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Rambles Around Old Boston 



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The Old South Church 



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Rambles Around 
Old Boston 



By J.. 
Edwin M/Bacon 

IVith Drawings by 
Lester G. Hornby 



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SWVAD-aHS 



Boston 

Little, Brown, and Company 

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Copyright, IQ14, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 



All rights reserved 
Published, October, 1914 



ELHCTROTYPED BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE 
PRESSWORK BY LOUIS H. CROSSCUP, BOSTON, U.S.A. 



NOV 16 1914 

0)C1,A388414 
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Contents 

Chapter Page 
I. The Storied Town of "Crooked Little 

Streets" i 

11. Old State House, Dock Square, Faneuil Hall 19 

HI. Copp's Hill and Old North (Christ) Church 

Region 59 

IV. The Common and Round About 87 

V. Over Beacon Hill 117 

VI. The Water Front I47 

VII. Old South, King's Chapel, and Neighbor- 
hood 169 

VIII. Picturesque Spots 193 



[ v] 









IP- 



Illustrations 

Pags 
The Underground Passage Between old Province Court 

and Har\-ard Place Half-TitU 

The Old South Church Frontispiece 

The Frigate Constitution at the Navy Yard v 

Dorchester Heights from ]^Ieeting House Hill vii 

The Province Court Entrance to the Underground 

Passage I 

Harvard Place 9 

The Old State House 25 

In Dock Square 31 

Faneuil Hall and Quincv Market 39 

Quaint Buildings of Comhill 49 

Copp's Hill Burying Ground 6^ 

Christ Church 69 



Illustrations 

Page 

Bunker Hill Monument from the Belfry of Christ Church 77 

The Paul Revere House, North Square 83 

On the Common, Showing Park Street Church .... 93 

On Boston Common A^lall in front of old St. Paul's . . . 103 

Across the Frog Pond to the old houses of Beacon Hill . 1 1 1 

Dome of the State House, and site of the old John 

Hancock House 121 

Colonial Doorway and Lamp on Mount Vernon Street . 131 

Number 74^ Pinckney Street 137 

Old Loft Buildings, Commercial Wharf 151 

The last of the Fishing Fleet at old T Wharf 155 

A Bit of old Long Wharf 159 

In the old "Bell-in-Hand" Tavern 181 

King's Chapel 187 

The Iron Gate between Province and Bosworth Streets . 193 

A Bit of old Leverett Street 197 

The Quaint Corner where Poplar and Chambers Streets 

meet 201 

The Boston Stone 207 



[ viii ] 



!..."- -- 






H 5 










Rambles Around Old Boston 



THE STORIED TOWN OF "CROOKED LITTLE 
STREETS " 

WE were three — a visiting Englishman, the 
Artist, and Antiquary. The Artist and 
Antiquary were the gossiping guides; the EngHsh- 
man the guided. The Englishman would "do" 
Old Boston exclusively. He had "done" the 
blend of Old and New, and now would hark back 
to the Old and review it in leisurely strolls among 
its landmarks. He had asked the Artist and An- 
tiquary to pilot him companionably, and they 
would meet his wishes, and gladly, for the per- 
sonal conducting of a stranger so saturated with 
Old Boston lore as he appeared to be could not 
be other than agreeable. 

Beyond the few treasured historic memorials, 
the landmarks he especially would seek were 
many of them long ago annihilated in those re- 
peated marches of progress or of improvement 

[ 3 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

common to all growing cities, or effaced In the 
manifold makings-over of the topography of the 
Old Town, than which none other In Christendom 
has undergone more. Still, If not the Identical 
things, the sites of a select number of them could 
be Identified for him, and their story or legend 
rehearsed, while the Artist's pencil would repro- 
duce yet remaining bits of the Old jumbled with 
the New. 

So we sauntered, we three, through the crowded 
old streets of the modern city, Imaging the Old 
Town of the past. 

Properly our initial ramble was within the nar- 
row bounds of the beginnings of the Puritan capi- 
tal, the "metropolis of the wilderness", hanging 
on the harbor's edge of the little "pear-shaped", 
be-hilled peninsula, for which the founders, those 
"well-educated, polite persons of good estate", 
took Old Boston In England for its name and 
London for its model. The Lincolnshire borough 
on the WItham was to be its prototype only In 
name. The founders would have their capital 
town be to New England In its humble way what 
London was to Old England. So Boston was 
bullded, a likeness In miniature to London. 

[4] 



'The Storied Town 

This London look and Old England aspect, we 
remarked, remained to and through the Revolu- 
tion; and in a shadowy way remains to-day, as 
our guest would see. It was indeed a natural 
family likeness, for, as the record shows, Boston 
from the beginning was the central point of the 
most thoroughly English community in the New 
World. There was no infusion of a foreign ele- 
ment of consequence until the end of the Colony 
period and the close of the seventeenth century. 
Then the French Huguenots had begun to appear 
and mingle with the native Puritans. But while 
early in the Province period this element became 
sufficient in numbers to set up a church of its 
own, and to bring about some softening of the 
old austerities of the Puritan town life, it did not 
impair the English stamp. These French Huguenots 
easily assimilated In the community, which wel- 
comed them, and in time these competent artisans 
and merchants, the Bowdolns, the Faneuils, Char- 
dons, Sigourneys, Reveres, Molineuxes, Greenleafs, 
became almost as English, or American-English, 
as the rest. Nor was the stamp Impaired by the 
infusion of Scotch and Irish into the Colony in 
increasing numbers during the latter half of the 

[si 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries; 
nor by the floating population of various nation- 
alities naturally drawn to a port of consequence, 
as Boston was, the chief in the colonies from the 
outset. These floaters, coming and going, merely 
lent variety and picturesqueness — or brought 
temporary trouble — to the sober streets. Up to 
the Revolution the population remained homo- 
geneous, with the dominating influences distinct- 
ively of English lineage. When with the Revo- 
lution the English yoke was thrown off and the 
"Bostoneers" tore down every emblem of royalty 
and every sign of a Tory and burned them in 
a huge bonfire in front of the Old State House, 
and afterward re-named King Street "State", and 
Queen Street "Court", they could not blot out 
its English mark. And well into the nineteenth 
century, when in 1822 Boston emerged from a 
town to a city, the population was still "singu- 
larly homogeneous"; it came to cityhood slowly 
and somewhat reluctantly after repeated attempts, 
the first early in ^ the Colony period. Edmund 
Quincy, in his fascinating life of his distinguished 
father, Josiah Quincy, writing of the municipality 
in 1823 during Josiah Quincy's first admlnlstra- 

[61 



The Storied Town 

tion as mayor — he was the city's second mayor — 
observes: "The great Irish and German emigration 
had not then set in. The city was eminently 
English in its character and appearance, and 
probably no town of its size in England had a 
population of such unmixed English descent as the 
Boston of that day. It was Anglis ipsis Anglior 
— more English than the English themselves. 
The inhabitants of New England at that time 
were descended, with scarcely any admixture of 
foreign blood, from the Puritan emigration of the 
seventeenth century." 

This complexion remained untarnished for a 
decade or so longer. The infusion of foreign ele- 
ments that changed it began about the latter 
eighteen-thirties and the early forties, with the 
development of large New England industries, 
of which Boston was the financial center — the 
building of canals, turnpikes, railroads, factories; 
the expansion of commerce with the advent 
of steamships. It came rapidly, too, this change 
in complexion, when fairly begun. Lemuel Shat- 
tuck's census of Boston for 1845, a local classic 
in its way, disclosed a state of affairs which as- 
tonished the self-satisfied Bostonian of that day 

[7] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

in its demonstration that the native born com- 
prised only a little more than one third of the 
population, "the remainder being emigrants from 
other places in the United States or from foreign 
countries." Within the next half-century the 
proportion had become one third of foreign birth, 
and another third of foreign parentage. Yet 
withal, the old English likeness was not shat- 
tered; it was but dimmed. 

As the founders and settlers brought with them 
all their beloved old-home characteristics and 
would transplant them, as was possible, in their 
new home, so we find their earliest "crooked 
little streets" with old London names. So the 
earlier social life, grim though it was with its 
puritanical tinge, is seen to have been old English 
in a smaller and narrower way. So were the 
manners and customs. The taverns were named 
for old London inns. The shop signs repeated 
old London symbols. 

And to-day, as we ramble about the shadowy 
precincts of the Colony Town, we chance delect- 
ably here and there upon a twisting street yet 
holding its first-given London name — a London- 
like old court, byway, or alley; a Londonish 

[8] 






1 .1 






Harvard Place 



'The Storied Town 

foot-passage making short cut between thorough- 
fares; an arched way through buildings in old 
London style. So, too, we find yet lingering, 
though long since in disuse, an old, London- 
fashioned underground passage or two between 
courts or one-time habitations, suggestive of 
smuggling days and of romance. Such Is that 
grim underground passage between old Province 
Court and Harvard Place, issuing on Washington 
Street opposite the Old South Meeting-house, 
which starts in the court near a plumbing shop 
and runs alongside the huge granite foundations 
of the rear wall of the old Province House, 
seat of the royal governors, now long gone save 
its side wall of Holland brick, which still remains 
intact. This passage must have eluded Haw- 
thorne, else surely it would have figured in one 
of his incomparable "Legends" of this rare place 
of Provincial pomp and elegance. Then there 
was, until recent years, that other and more 
significant passage, opening from this one, and 
extending under the Province House and the 
highway in front, eastward toward the sea. 
Gossip Tradition has it, or some latter-day dis- 
coverer has fancied, that by this passage some 

[ II ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

of Howe's men made their escape to the water- 
front at the Evacuation. Others call it a smug- 
gler's passage. In that day the water came up 
Milk Street to the present Liberty Square, and 
southward to old Church Green, which used to 
be at the junction of Summer and Bedford streets. 
An explorer of this passage — the engineer of 
the tavern which now occupies the site of the 
Province House orchard (a genuine antiquary — 
this engineer, who, during service with the tavern 
from its erection, has delved deep into colonial 
history of this neighborhood), says that its out- 
let apparently was somewhere near Church Green. 
It was closed up in part in late years by build- 
ing operations, and further by the construction 
of the Washington Street Tunnel. 

The peninsula as the colonists found it we 
recalled from the familiar description of the local 
historians. It was a neck of land jutting out 
at the bottom of Massachusetts Bay with a 
fine harbor on its sea side; at its back, the Charles 
River, uniting at its north end with the Mystic 
River as it enters the harbor from the north 
side of Charlestown; its whole territory only 
about four miles in circuit; its less than eight 

[ 12 ] 



The Storied Town 

hundred acres comprising several abrupt eleva- 
tions, with valleys between. The loftiest elevation 
was the three-peaked hill in its heart, which gave it 
its first English name of Trimountain, and became 
Beacon, on the river side; the next in height, on 
the harbor front, were the north and south pro- 
montories of a great cove, which became respec- 
tively Copp's Hill and Fort Hill. This peninsula 
was sparsely clad with trees, but thick in bushes 
and reeds, the surface indented by four deep 
coves, inlets of ocean and river, and by creeks 
and ponds; and with sea margins wide, flat, 
oozy. The original area, our guest was told, 
was expanded to more than eighteen hundred 
acres in subsequent periods in the nineteenth 
century by the filling in of the coves, creeks, and 
ponds and the reclamation of marshes and flats. 
The Town w^as begun round about the Market 
Place, which was at the head of the present 
State Street, where is now the Old State House. 
About the Alarket Place the first homes were 
built and the first highways struck out. Thence 
meandered the earliest of those legendary "cow 
paths," the lanes from which evolved the "crooked 
little streets" leading to the home lots and gardens 

[ 13 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

of settlers. State Street and Washington Street 
were the first highways, the one "The Great 
Street to the Sea", the other "The High Waye to 
Roxberrie", where the peninsula joined the main- 
land, perhaps along Indian trails. At the outset 
the "High Waye" reached only as far as School 
and Milk streets, where is now the Old South 
Meeting-house, and this was early called Cornhill. 
Soon, however, a further advance was made to 
Summer, this extension later being called Marl- 
borough Street, in commemoration of the vic- 
tory of Blenheim. In a few years a third street 
was added, toward Essex and Boylston streets, 
named Newbury. The "sea" then came up 
in the Great Cove from the harbor fairly close 
to the present square of State Street, for high- 
water mark was at the present Kilby Street 
on the south side and Merchants Row on the 
north side. The Great Cove swept inside of 
these streets. Merchants Row followed the 
shore northward to a smaller cove, stretching 
from where is now North Market Street and the 
Quincy Market (the first Mayor Quincy's monu- 
ment) and over the site of Faneuil Hall to Dock 
Square, which became the Town Dock. Other 

[ 14] 



The Storied Town 

pioneer highways were the nucleus of the present 
Tremont Street, originally running along the 
northeastern spurs of the then broad-spreading 
Beacon Hill and passing through the Common; 
Hanover Street, at first a narrow lane, from what 
is now Scollay Square, and Ann, afterward 
North Street, from Dock Square, both leading 
to the ferries by Copp's Hill, where tradition 
says the Indians had their ferry. Court Street 
was first Prison Lane, from the Market Place 
to the prison, a grewsome dungeon, early set up, 
where now stands the modern City Hall Annex. In 
its day it harbored pirates and Quakers, and 
Hawthorne fancied it for the opening scenes of 
his "Scarlet Letter." School Street took its name 
from the first schoolhouse and the first school, 
whence sprang the Boston Latin School, which 
felicitates itself that it antedates the university 
at Cambridge and "dandled Harvard College on 
its knee." Milk Street, first "Fort Lane", was 
the first way to Fort Hill on the harbor front. 
Summer Street, first "Mylne Lane", led to 
"Widow Tuthill's Windmill", near where was 
Church Green, up to which the water came. 
"Cow Lane", now High Street, led from Church 

[ 15] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

Green, or Mill Lane, to the foot of Fort Hill. 
Essex Street was originally at its eastern end 
part of the first cartway to the Neck and Roxbury, 
a beach road that ran along the south shore of 
the South Cove, another expansive indentation, 
extending from the harbor on the south side of 
Fort Hill to the Neck. Boylston Street, origi- 
nally "Frog Lane", and holding fast to this bu- 
colic appellation into the nineteenth century, was 
a swampy way, running westward along the south 
side of Boston Common toward the open Back 
Bay — the back basin of the Charles — then 
flowing up to a pebbly beach at the Common's 
western edge and to the present Park Square. 

Here, then, on the levels about the Great 
Cove, in the form of a crescent, facing the sea 
and backed by the three-peaked hill, the Town 
was established. 

The first occupation was within the scant terri- 
tory bounded, generally speaking, on the east by 
State Street at the high-water line of the Great 
Cove; northerly by Merchants Row around to 
near the site of Faneuil Hall; northwesterly by 
Dock Square and Hanover Street; westerly by 
the great hill and Tremont Street; southerly 

[ i6] 



The Storied Town 

by School and Milk streets; and Milk Street 
again to the water, then working up toward 
the present Liberty Square at the junction of 
Kilby, Water, and Batterymarch streets. Soon, 
however, the limits expanded, reaching south- 
ward to Summer Street, and not long after to 
Essex and Boylston streets; eastward, to the har- 
bor front at and around Fort Hill; westward and 
northwestward, about another broad cove — this the 
North Cove, later the "Mill Cove" with busy mills 
about it, an indentation on the north of Beacon 
Hill by the widening of the Charles River at its 
mouth, and covering the space now Haymarket 
Square; and northward, over the peninsula's North 
End, which early became the seat of gentility. 

No further expansion of moment was made 
through the Colony period, and the extension was 
slight during the Province period. Beacon Hill, 
except its slopes, remained till after the Revo- 
lution in its primitive state, its long western reach 
a place of pastures over which the cows roamed, 
and the barberry and the wild rose grew. 

The foot of the Common on the margin of the 
glinting Back Bay was the Town's west bound- 
ary till after the Revolution and into the nine- 

[ 17 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

teenth century. Till then the tide of the Back 
Bay flowed up the present Beacon Street some 
two hundred feet above the present Charles Street. 
The Town's southern Hmit, except a few houses 
toward the Neck on the fourth Hnk of the high- 
way to Roxbury (called Orange Street in honor of 
the House of Orange), was still Essex and Boyls- 
ton streets. The one landway to the mainland, 
till after the second decade of the nineteenth 
century, remained the long, lean Neck to Rox- 
bury. The only water way, at the beginning 
of the Town, was by means of ships' boats, after- 
ward by scows. No bridge from Boston was 
built till the Revolution was two years past. 

So the "storied town" remained, till the close 
of the historic chapter, a little one, the built- 
up territory of which could easily be covered in a 
stroll of a day or two. 

From its establishment as the capital, Boston's 
history was so interwoven with that of the Colony 
that in England the Colony came early to be desig- 
nated the "Bostoneers", and the charter which 
the founders brought with them and for the reten- 
tion of which the colonists were in an almost con- 
stant struggle, was termed the "Boston Charter." 

[ i8 ] 



II 

OLD STATE HOUSE, DOCK SQUARE, FANEUIL HALL 

THE first governor's "mansion", the first 
minister's house, the meeting-house which 
was the first public structure to be erected, set 
up in the Town's second summer, and the dwell- 
ings and warehouses of the first shopkeeper and 
of the wider merchant-traders, were grouped 
about the Market Place on the central "Great 
Street to the Sea." Other first citizens located 
in the neighborhood of the Town Dock. Others 
along the High Waye between the Dock and School 
and Bromfield streets; on Milk Street; and 
round about the "Springgate" — Spring Lane — 
where was one of those bounteous springs which 
had drawn Winthrop and his followers to the 
peninsula. A few were scattered on School 
Street; on the nucleus of Tremont Street along 
the spurs of Beacon Hill; and about Hanover 
Street and the other lane to the North End. 
The first tavern was set up on the High Waye, in 

[ 19] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

comfortable reach of the center of things. The 
occupation of the North End was begun actively 
within the Town's first decade. 

The pioneer houses were generally of one story 
and with thatched roof. But very soon more sub- 
stantial structures were raised, mostly of wood; 
and by the time that the Town was twenty years 
old, its buildings were sufficiently advanced to be 
described by the contemporary historian as "beau- 
tifull and large, some fairly set forth with Brick, 
Tile, Stone, and Slate, and orderly placed with 
comly streets whose continuall inlargement pres- 
sages some sumptuous City." Hipped roofs 
were coming into vogue; and houses with "jet- 
ties", projecting stories. At forty, the Town 
was showing a few of those three-story brick 
houses, broad-fronted, with arched windows, which 
are pictured as early colonial. Some of the few 
stone houses were of ambitious style and propor- 
tions. Notable was the "Gibbs house", on Fort 
Hill, the seat of Robert Gibbs, merchant. "A 
stately edifice which it is thought will stand him 
in little less than £3000. before it be fully fin- 
ished", was Josselyn's description in 1671 or 
thereabouts, when it was building. It was in 

[ 20 1 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

this GIbbs house that Andros lodged on his first 
coming into the Town, and in it were quartered 
his guard of "about sixty red coats." Grandest 
of all was the Sergeant house, on Marlborough 
Street, nearly opposite the Old South, set back 
from the thoroughfare in stately exclusiveness, 
the mansion of Peter Sergeant, a rich merchant 
from London, erected in 1679, and, after the 
opulent merchant's death, bought by the Province, 
in 1 716, and becoming the famous Province 
House, official home of the royal governors. 
Before the middle of the Province period, pros- 
perous Bostonians had begun erecting mansions 
of that finest type of American colonial, the 
great, roomy house, generally of brick though 
often of wood, with high brick ends, the few 
remaining relics of which in Salem, Newburyport, 
Portsmouth, fewer in Cambridge, so comfort the 
eye. These highly dignified Boston mansions 
were not infrequently set in spacious gardens, and 
surrounded with luscious fruit orchards, refreshing 
the town with their pleasant aspect. All long 
since disappeared. The distinctive Boston "swell 
front" was of the early nineteenth century, after 
houses in block began to make their appearance. 

[ 21 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

Bulfinch, the pioneer native architect, was among 
the earliest of its builders. 

The Market Place lay open through the Town's 
first quarter century and more, the central resort 
for business or for gossip. In its third year, by 
order of the General Court, Boston was made a 
market town, and Thursday was appointed market 
day. At the same time the "Thursday Lecture" 
was instituted, the weekly discourse which was to 
play so prominent a part in the religious life of 
the Town for more than two centuries, — thus 
deftly welding trade with religion. So Thursday 
became the Town's gala day. Then the country 
folk flocked into Town and to the Market Place 
and bartered their products for the wares of the 
Boston tradesmen, while the Lecture was taken in 
as a pious pastime. Early the market day 
became a favorite time for public punishments, 
for their disciplinary effects, perhaps, upon the 
"generality" of the populace. These spectacles 
customarily followed the Lecture, through which 
not unfrequently the wretched culprits must sit 
before undergoing their ordeal. Those instruments 
of torture, the whipping-post, the pillory, and the 
stocks, were placed conspicuously in the forefront, 

[ 22 ] 






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77ie Old State House 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

and the people gazed complacently — because such 
were the customs of the day in Old as in New 
England — upon whippings of women as well as 
of men, and sometimes of girls; upon the exhibi- 
tion of women in the pillory with a cleft stick 
in the tongue, for too free exercise of this ofttimes 
unruly member. The show of a forger and liar 
bound to the whipping-post "till the Lecture, 
from the first bell", when his ears were to be 
clipped off; the sight of whippings and ear cut- 
tings, or nose slittings, for "scandalous speeches 
against the church", or for speaking disrespect- 
fully of the ministers, or of the magistrates were 
not unusual. Upon such or even worse scourgings 
for the pettiest of offenses as for graver crimes 
the good people were freely privileged to gaze. 
Nor were these punishments confined to the hum- 
bler classes. No discrimination was made between 
high and lowly wrongdoers. The local dry-as- 
dusts love to tell of that maker of the first Boston 
stocks who, "for his extortion, takeing !•. 13 ^ 
7^. for the plank and wood work", was the first 
to be set in them. And there is satisfaction in 
reading of the case of one "Nich. Knopp", who 
had taken upon himself to cure the scurvy by 

[25] 



Rambles Arou7id Old Boston 

a water of "noe worth nor value, which he sold 
at a very deare rate." Surely a fine of five 
pounds, with imprisonment "till he pay his fine, 
or give securitie for it, or els to be whipped", 
and making him liable "to any man's action of 
whome he hath received money for the said 
water" was none too rough for this scamp. 
Sometimes the woman with the scarlet badge on 
her breast may have been seen among the market- 
day gatherers. Here, too, unorthodox books were 
publicly burned. 

Through these first thirty years of the Town, 
the Meeting-house stood beside the Market Place, 
serving for all Town and Colony business as well 
as for all religious purposes. At first it was a 
pioneer rude house of stone and mud walls and 
thatched roof set up on the south side (its site 
marked by a neat tablet above the portal of an 
office building) but lasting only eight years; then 
its more substantial successor of wood, placed on 
the Cornhill of the High Waye (in front of where 
is now and long has been Young's, of savorous 
memories). Then in 165 7-1 659, the Town House 
— practically a Town and Colony House com- 
bined, of which the conserved Old State House is 

[ 26 1 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

the lineal descendant — was erected in the heart of 
the Market Place, and in its stead became the 
business exchange and the official center. Thus 
the Market Place was in large part closed, and 
the square at the Town House front alone be- 
came the public gathering place. So the square 
remained the people's rendezvous upon occasions 
of moment to the end of Colony and Province 
days, a central setting of what another English- 
man with cousinly graclousness has termed "the 
great part" that Boston played "in the historical 
drama of the New World." 

How this first Town and Colony House was 
provided for in the longest will on record by wor- 
thy Captain Robert Keayne, the enterprising mer- 
chant tailor and public-spirited citizen, who be- 
came the richest man of his time in the Town, yet 
could not escape penalty and censure by court 
and church for taking exorbitant profits, is a 
familiar Old Boston story. Despite his disciplin- 
ing by the very paternal government, the captain 
remained a Boston worthy In excellent standing 
and zealous in Town and Church affairs, till the 
end of his days. His memory is kept green as the 
father of the still lusty Ancient and Honorable 

[ 27] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

Artillery Company, the oldest military organiza- 
tion in the country, and father of the first Public 
Library in America, as well as father of the first 
Boston Town House, in which the making of large 
history was begun. Keayne indeed recovered 
favor by acknowledging his "covetous and cor- 
rupt behaviour." But he closed, in his defense of 
it, with the offer of the business rules that had 
guided him; and much space in that prodigious 
will — one hundred and fifty-eight folio pages, all 
"writ in his own hand" — was devoted to a 
justification of his business conduct. Nothing 
more refreshing illustrates the business ethics of 
that simple day than this Puritan merchant's 
defense and the minister's offset to it. The rules 
that Keayne pled as guiding him were these: 

"First, That if a merchant lost on one com- 
modity he might help himself on the price of 
another. Second, That if through want of skill 
or other occasions his commodity cost him more 
than the price of the market in England, he might 
then sell it for more than the price of the market 
in New England." 

The minister, in this case John Cotton, would 
set up this higher code: 

[ 28] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

"First, That a man may not sell above the 
current price. Second, That when a man loseth 
in his commodity for want of skill he must look 
at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must 
not lay it upon another. Third, That when a man 
loseth by casualty at sea etc., it is a lofs cast 
upon him by Providence, and he may not ease 
himself of it by casting it upon another for so a 
man should seem to provide against all provi- 
dences, etc. that he should never lose 2: but where 
there is a scarcity of the commodity there men 
may raise their prices, for now it is a hand of 
God upon the commodity and not the person. 
Fourth, That a man may not ask any more for 
his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron 
to Abraham, the land is worth so much." 

Keayne had been a successful merchant tailor 
in London before coming out, and a London mili- 
tary man. He was for several years a member of 
the Honourable Artillery Company of London, after 
which the Boston company was modeled. He 
was made the first commander of the Boston com- 
pany upon its organization on the first Monday 
in June, 1638 — the day that has ever since, with 
the exception of lapses in the Civil War period, 

[29] 



Rambles Around Old Bosto7t 

been celebrated in Boston with all the old-time 
pomp and ceremony as Artillery Election Day. 
When he died, the year before the beginning of 
his Town house, he was presumably honored with 
a grand military funeral, and was buried beside 
the other fathers in the old First Burying-ground, 
which became the King's Chapel. He was par- 
ticularly associated with the Boston founders as 
the brother-in-law of John Wilson, the first minis- 
ter and the personage next in consequence to 
John Winthrop and John Cotton In the early 
Town life. Their seats were nearly opposite, on 
either side of the Market Place. Keayne's was 
on the south side, the comfortable house, the shop, 
and the garden occupying the ample lot between 
*' Pudding Lane" — Devonshire Street — and Corn- 
hill. Wilson's glebe, on the north side, facing 
the square, was an even more generous lot, extend- 
ing back to the water of the Town Dock by Dock 
Square, and covering Devonshire Street north, 
which originally was a zigzag path from the 
Market Place to the head of the Dock across the 
minister's garden. After the path had expanded 
into a lane, and had sometime borne the title 
of "Crooked," it was given the minister's name; 

[ 30] 



i^- 














k-,^f^mm) 















ffii^ 



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x'^iir 






^il-ft\^/VK 



'■'*i' 



-' -C^'O^t". 



>a" 






/;; Dock Square 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

and as "Wilson's Lane" it remained to modern 
times when, with the extension of Devonshire 
Street through the ancient way, the good old 
colonial appellation was stupidly dropped. A cen- 
tury after Keayne's day, the British Main Guard 
was stationed on the site of his seat, with its 
guns pointed menacingly at the south door of the 
present Old State House; and where Parson 
Wilson's house had stood was the Royal Exchange 
Tavern, before which, and the Royal Custom 
House on the lower Royal Exchange Lane (now 
Exchange Street) corner, were lined up Captain 
Preston's file at the "Boston Massacre." 

Keayne would have a Town House ample not 
only for the accommodation of the Town govern- 
ment. Town meetings, the courts, and the General 
Court, but also of the church elders, a public 
library, and an armory. But the sum that he 
bequeathed for his house and for a conduit and 
a market place besides, was only three hundred 
pounds. Accordingly subscription papers were 
passed among the townsfolk, and they contributed 
an additional fund which, with the legacy and a little 
aid from the Colony treasury, warranted the raising 
of a satisfactory structure. The townsmen being 

[33 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

poor In cash, most of their subscriptions were pay- 
able In merchandise, in building materials, in a 
specified number of days' work, or in materials 
and work combined. So this pioneer capitol duly 
appeared, completed in March, 1659, after a year 
and a half in construction, a "substantial and 
comely building", and a credit to the Town and 
to its builders. Its erection marked an epoch in 
the Town's history. The quaint pictures of it 
in the books are fanciful ones, drawn from the 
details of the contract, for no sketch is extant. 
It was a stout-timbered structure set up on pillars 
ten feet high, twenty-one of them, and jettying 
out from the pillars "three foot every way", a 
story and a half, with three gable ends, a balus- 
trade, and turrets. It was called the fairest 
public structure in all the colonies. The open 
space inside the pillars at first was a free market 
place. Later, perhaps, after its repair and en- 
richment at a considerable cost, which was divided 
between the Colony and the Town and County, 
parts were closed In for small shops; and the first 
bookstalls were here. In this open space, also, 
or on the floor above, was the "walk for the 
merchants" after the London Exchange fashion. 

[34] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

At first 'change hour was from eleven to twelve. 
After a time the custom was introduced of an- 
nouncing the opening of 'change by the ringing 
of a bell; and the bell-ringer was to be allowed 
twelve pence a year for every person commonly 
resorting to the place. 

This comely capltol served the Town and 
Colony for half a century: through the remainder 
of the Colony period, the Inter-Charter period, 
and into the Province period. Here sat the colo- 
nial governors from Endicott to Bradstreet. Then 
came Joseph Dudley, as President of New Eng- 
land, with his fifteen councillors. Then Andros, 
as "captain-general and governor-in-chief of all 
New England", till his overthrow by the bloodless 
revolution of April, 1689, "the first forcible re- 
sistance to the crown in America", when the 
"Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and 
Inhabitants of Boston" was proclaimed from the 
balcony overlooking the square. Then Brad- 
street again, now the Nestor of the old magis- 
trates, in his eighty-seventh year, yet hale, sitting 
with the "council of peace and safety." Then 
the earlier of the royal governors, under the 
Province Charter, beginning with the rough-dia- 

[ 35 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

mond sailor-soldier Phips, when Boston had be- 
come the capital of a vast State, with the terri- 
tories of Plymouth Colony, of Maine, and of 
Nova Scotia added to Massachusetts. And this 
was the Town House in which, in 1686, Randolph 
instituted, with the Reverend Robert Ratcliffe, 
brought out from London, as rector, the first 
Church of England church in Boston, when the 
authorities rigidly refused the use of any of the 
orthodox meeting-houses in the Town, now three, 
by the Episcopalians; but one of which — the 
Old South, then the Third — Andros speedily 
seized for their occupation alternately with the 
regular congregation. It was a place, too, of 
festivities, this Town House. Within it state 
dinners were given; and pleasing receptions to the 
visiting guest. John Dunton, the gossipy London 
bookseller, here in 1686, tells of being invited by 
Captain Hutchinson to dine with "the Governor 
and Magistrates of Boston", the "place of enter- 
tainment being the Town-Hall" and the feast 
"rich and noble." 

Then, on an early October night of 171 1, this 
house went down in ashes in a great fire — the 
eighth "great fire" which the Town had suifered 

[36] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

in its short existence of eighty years — along with 
the neighboring Meeting-house, and a hundred other 
buildings, — dwelling-houses, shops, and taverns. 
The fire swept over both sides of Cornhill be- 
tween the Meeting-house and School Street, and 
both sides of the upper parts of King and Queen 
streets. It was in this affliction that Increase 
Mather, the minister-statesman, saw the wrath 
of God upon the Town for its profanation of the 
Sabbath. "Has not God's Holy Day been Pro- 
faned in New England!" he exclaimed in his next 
Sunday's sermon, graphically entitled "Burnings 
Bewailed." "Have not Burdens been carried 
through the Streets on the Sabbath Day? Have 
not Bakers, Carpenters, and other Tradesmen 
been employed in Servile Works on the Sabbath 
Day?" He would have stricter enforcement of 
the strict Puritan Sunday laws, which yet closed 
the Town from sunset on Saturday to sunset on 
Sunday against all toil and all worldly pleasure, 
permitted no strolling on street or Common, no 
cart to pass out or to come in, no horseman or 
footman, unless satisfactory statement of the 
necessity of the travel could be given. And this 
somber observance of Sunday continued to be 

[37] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

enforced with more or less vigor till after the 
Revolution. There is a pretty, apocryphal tale of 
the fining of Governor Hancock for strolling along 
the Mall of the Common on his way home from 
church. But the selectmen of 171 1 took the more 
practical step, in ordering the stricter enforcement of 
building regulations, and in influencing a reconstruc- 
tion of the burnt district of brick instead of wood. 
So, on the ruins of the old, arose a new Town 
and Colony House of brick, a new brick meeting- 
house, a new Cornhill of houses and shops, largely 
of brick. The outer walls of the new capitol, 
completed in 171 3, we see in the present building. 
It was a grander house than the first. There was 
an East Chamber, with balcony giving on the 
square, handsomely fitted for the governor and 
council, a Middle Chamber for the representatives, 
a West Chamber for the courts; and in other parts 
comfortable quarters for the Town officers. The 
*'walk for the merchants" was, as before, on the 
street floor, but more capacious; while 'change 
hour was now one o'clock as in London. Pretty 
soon the exchange was surrounded by book- 
sellers' shops. These bookstalls, all having a good 
trade, together with "five printing-presses" in 

[ 38 ] 










'■/<^'^\'^ ?, .->='' 



Faneuil Hall and ^liricy Market 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

the Town, "generally full of work", particularly 
impressed the Londoner, Daniel Neal, visiting 
Boston about 1719 and writing a book on his 
American impressions. By these, he flatteringly 
remarked, "it appears that Humanity and the 
Knowledge of Letters flourish more here than in 
all the other English Plantations put together; 
for in the City of New York there is but one 
Bookseller's Shop, and in the Plantations of Vir- 
ginia, Maryland, Carolina, Barbadoes, and the 
Islands, none at all." Thus early were observed 
the evidences of that leadership in culture upon 
which the Boston of yesterday was wont much to 
plume itself. 

This House stood in its grandeur, a "fine piece 
of building" as the observant Neal characterized it, 
for thirty years only. Then, in early December, 
1747, it in turn was burned, all but its walls. 
Three years after, it was rebuilt upon and in the 
old walls, generally with the same interior ar- 
rangement, except the quarters for the Town offi- 
cers, which were now in Faneuil Hall, erected 
five years before the Town and Colony House 
burning. In the interim, the General Court sat 
in Faneuil Hall; while the rebuilding of the Colony 

[41 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

House in some place outside of Boston was agi- 
tated, or the occupation of some other site in the 
Town, as Fort Hill or Boston Common, The 
present building therefore is that of 1749, with 
the walls of 171 3. It stands restored in large part 
to the appearance it bore through the eventful 
fourteen years of the pre-Revolutionary period, 
when American history was making within it and, 
as John Adams recorded, "the child Independence 
was born." Thus it remains the most interesting 
historical building of its period in the country. 
And it is to-day cherished, along with the other 
two spared monuments — the Old South Meet- 
ing-house and Faneuil Hall — that distinctively 
commemorate those colonial, provincial, and Rev- 
olutionary events which make Boston unique 
among American cities; these with King's Chapel 
and Christ Church, are treasured by all classes of 
Bostonians with equal devotion as among the city's 
richest assets. The sentimentalist treasures them 
for their historical worth, the materialist for their 
commercial value, their drawing capacity, luring 
to the Old Town as to a Mecca pilgrims and stran- 
gers of the prosperous stripe, from far and wide, 
with money to spend in the shops and the mart. 

[42] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

But ah! what a fight It was, what a succession 
of fights, to retain the richer in accumulated as- 
sociations, — the old State House and the old 
Meeting-house! And so, too, hard fights were 
those to preserve in their integrity the other 
landmarks of the historic past that have been 
permitted to remain, — Boston Common, and the 
three ancient burying-grounds with their graves 
and tombs of American worthies. To-day let a 
promoter but suggest the cutting of streets 
through the Common to relieve the pressure of 
traffic, and straightway he is sprung upon by 
public opinion and threatened with ostracism. 
A mayor orders the taking of a part of the pre- 
serve for a public structure, and within twenty- 
four hours public opinion forces him to cancel the 
order. And yet it was not so many years ago 
that the opening of an avenue through its length 
connecting north and south thoroughfare, was con- 
templated with composure by many of those who 
like to be considered the "best citizens", and the 
scheme was prevented only through the efforts 
of a small contingent of that kidney whom 
Matthew Arnold calls the "saving remnant", who 
cultivated public opinion to revolt. As for the 

[43 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

ancient burying-grounds, the desecrators years ago 
got in their work to a woeful extent before the 
preservers could act to check it. This was par- 
ticularly the case with the King's Chapel and the 
Granary grounds. Under the direction of a 
sacrilegious city official, to suit his peasant taste 
of symmetry, was committed that "most accursed 
act of vandalism" (so forcibly and justly the 
generally genial Autocrat characterized it), in the 
uprooting of many of the upright stones from the 
graves and the rearranging of them as edge 
stones by new paths then struck out. This is 
the act which moved the Autocrat to that 
clever mot, almost compensation for the sacri- 
lege, — that "the old reproach" in epitaphs "of 
'Here lies'' never had such a wholesale illustra- 
tion as in these outraged burial-places, where 
the stone does lie above and the bones do not 
lie beneath." A later attempt to open a pathway 
across the King's Chapel ground to accommodate 
passers more directly from Tremont Street to 
Court Square, proposed by restless city officials, 
and frankly as an entering wedge for the ulti- 
mate sale of the ground for business purposes, or 
the taking for an extension of the City Hall, was 

[44] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

frustrated alone by the energetic protest of the 
Massachusetts Historical Society. 

The battle for the Old State House waged in- 
termittently through forty years, or from the time 
of the building's relinquishment as the City Hall, 
in 1841, the last official use to which it was put. 
During this desolating period it was hideously 
transformed for trade purposes that the city, 
whose property it then was, might get the largest 
rentals from it. Thus it stood a bedraggled thing 
at the entrance to the opulent center of money 
and stocks and bonds, a scandal to self-respecting 
Bostonians, while its demolition was repeatedly 
agitated as a useless incumbrance in the path 
of trade. In one of the periodical wrestles be- 
tween conservators and destroyers when, with the 
adoption of a street-widening scheme, the building 
seemed surely doomed, the pride of Boston was 
touched by a breezy offer from Chicago to buy 
it and transplant it there, with the promise that 
Chicago would protect it as an historical monu- 
ment "that all America should revere." When 
at length, as in the case of the Common, through 
the quickening of public sentiment by the "saving 
remnant", its preservation was secured, and its 

[45 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

restoration had been in part accomplished, Its 
integrity was assailed from an unexpected quarter. 
The local transit commission seized the street 
story and the basement for engineers' working 
offices, and for a tunnel railway station. At this 
proceeding, the conservators rose to a final and 
determined move for the reservation of the build- 
ing by law solely as a national "historic and 
patriotic memorial", free of all business or com- 
mercial encroachments, and Its maintenance as 
such. They got all they sought, except the oust- 
ing of the tunnel station. That, as we see, was 
permitted to abide, and so prevent complete 
restoration. Yet only to a comparatively slight 
extent. Except the lower part of this east end, 
and the foot passage through it, the building 
appears now fully restored to the outward and 
inward eighteenth-century aspect. Its occupa- 
tion, as custodian, by the Bostonian Society, 
formed to promote the study of the history of 
Boston and to preserve Its antiquities, an out- 
growth of the organization of the little band that 
led fights that ultimately saved the building, is 
most felicitous. The society's collection of Old 
Boston raretles, portraits, paintings, prints, manu- 

[46] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

scripts, mementoes, is rich and varied, and a half- 
day may be engagingly spent in a leisurely review 
of it. 

The Faneuil Hall we see Is the "Cradle of 
Liberty" of pre-Revolutionary days enlarged and 
embellished in the early nineteenth century to 
meet the requirements of later generations. It is 
the second "cradle", erected in 1763 within the 
frame of the original structure of 1742, doubled 
in width and elevated a story, and its auditorium 
doubled in height and supplied with galleries 
raised on Ionic columns at the line of the old 
ceiling. Except in parts of the frame — and 
perhaps in the gilded grasshopper that tops the 
cupola vane — nothing remains of the house that 
Peter Faneuil built and gave to the Town, and 
that the Town in gratitude voted should be called 
for him "forever." 

That house, in January, 1762, when twenty 
years old, was destroyed by fire, all but Its outer 
shell, like the second Town House burned fifteen 
years before; and also like It, Its successor was 
built upon the remaining walls. The reconstruc- 
tion of 1763, however, was practically a repro- 
duction of the original edifice In style and propor- 

[47] 



"A 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

tlons, so that in the present Hall we have traces 
of the architecture of the Faneuil gift. That 
structure was distinguished as the design of John 
Smibert, the Scotch painter, who, establishing his 
studio in the Town in 1729, was the earliest (if 
Peter Pelham, the engraver and occasional por- 
trait painter, John Singleton Copley's stepfather, 
is not to be so classed) to introduce good art in 
Boston with his portraits of ministers and pro- 
vincial dignitaries. In the enlargement of the Hall 
of 1763, and the refashioning of its interior, in 
1805, we see the hand of Charles Bulfinch, the 
pioneer native architect. The Faneuil gift was 
a handsome edifice, measuring only forty feet in 
width and a hundred in length, of two stories, 
the ground story for market use, with open 
arches, the auditorium above, low studded, the 
floor accommodating in public meeting a thousand 
persons. Small as it was, visitors pronounced 
it, as the Town vote of acceptance termed it, a 
"noble structure", and a magnificent gift for the 
times from a single individual. Compared with 
Captain Keayne's provision for the Town House 
a century earlier, it was counted princely. But 
Boston had now so grown in importance as to 

[48] 



^ 



^ ;;Sfci ff 






















y-n 



II ^j 









Quaint Buiidi?igs of Cortihill 



Old State House a?id Faneuil Hall 

warrant such a gift, and it had a pretty number of 
affluent townsmen who could make a similar 
donation as comfortably as the generous Hugue- 
not merchant. It was assumed to be the prin- 
cipal town of trade "of any in all the British 
American colonies." The harbor was busy with 
shipping. Boston trade was reaching "into every 
sea." Industries were prospering, regardless of 
the Parliamentary laws which would suppress 
colonial manufactures. Several of the merchants 
were enjoying rich revenues from productive plan- 
tations in the West Indies. Refinement and 
elegance were marking the homes and the customs 
of the "gentry." "There are several families 
that keep a coach and a pair of horses, and some 
few drive with four horses", wrote a Mr. Bennett, 
Londoner, in Boston about 1740. 

Peter Faneuil was reveling in the fortune of 
his uncle Andrew fresh in his hands, when he 
made his offer to the Town. Andrew Faneuil 
had died In 1737, the richest man In Boston, and 
had bequeathed his handsome estate to his 
favorite nephew, who already had acquired con- 
siderable property through his own activity In 
business. Peter had moved into his uncle's man- 

[ 51 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

sion-house, one of the fairest in town, and was 
stocking it with comforts and luxuries for his 
own enjoyment and the exercise of an elegant 
hospitality. "Send me five pipes of your very 
best Madeira wine of an amber colour, and as 
this is for my house, be very careful that I have 
the best", he wrote to one of his business corre- 
spondents in London. To another, "Send me the 
latest best book of the several sorts of cookery, 
which pray let be of the largest character for the 
benefit of the maid's reading." Another was 
requested to buy for him for a house boy, "as 
likely a straight negro lad", and "one as tractable 
In disposition" as his correspondent could find. 
And from London he ordered "a handsome chariot 
with two sets of harnesses", and the Faneuil 
arms engraved thereon in the best manner, "but 
not too gaudy." 

The Faneuil mansion was on Tremont Street, 
opposite the King's Chapel Burying-ground and 
neighboring historic sites. Just north of it had 
stood the colonial Governor Bellingham's stone 
mansion, which he was occupying when first chosen 
governor in 1641, and the scene of dignified fes- 
tivities. Next north of Bellingham's was the 

[ 52] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

humbler house of the great John Cotton and 
Cotton's friend, debonair Harry Vane's, which 
adjoined the minister's house. The Cotton house 
and garden lot were south of the entrance to 
the present Pemberton Square; and the glebe 
extended back from the street and up and over 
the east peak of Beacon Hill, this peak then 
mounting abruptly and high, and given the minis- 
ter's name — Cotton Hill. The fair Faneuil 
mansion, built by the rich Andrew, about 17 lo, 
was a broad-faced house of brick, painted white, 
with a semicircular balcony over the wide front 
door, and set in a beautiful garden, with terraces 
rising at the back against the still remaining hill. 
Here Peter flourished, a generous host, a quietly 
beneficent citizen, an amiable gentleman, five 
luxurious years. Then he died suddenly, on the 
second of March, 1743, of dropsy, in his forty- 
third year. And as it happened, the first annual 
Town meeting in the new Hall was held to take 
action on his death, and to listen to an eulogy 
of him. His funeral was a grand one. He was 
buried in the Old Granary Burying-ground in the 
tomb of his uncle. This tomb was without in- 
scription, marked only by the sculptured arms of 

[ 53 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

the Faneuil family. The arms, after the lapse of 
years, failed to identify it, and where Peter was 
buried became a local query. At length, a delving 
antiquary rediscovered it, and the good man in 
simplest orthography inscribed it " P. Funel." 
Peter's pen portrait a contemporary diarist thus 
limned: "a fat, brown, squat man, and lame", 
with a shortened hip from childhood. The same 
diarist recorded that the writer had heard "he 
had done more charitable deeds than any man 
y* lived in the Town." 

The rebuilder of the Hall after the fire of 1762 
was the Town, aided by a lottery authorized by 
the Province. The new house was dedicated by 
James Otis, the patriot orator, he of the "tongue 
of flame", to the "cause of liberty", and this was 
the origin of its popular title of the "Cradle of 
Liberty." The first Hall had also been dedicated 
to liberty by Faneuil's eulogist, John Lovell, 
master of the Latin School, but this was quali- 
fied — "with loyalty to a king under whom we 
enjoy that liberty." Had Faneuil lived, he might 
not have been so well disposed toward the second 
house, for the Town meetings were now growing 
hot, and his associates were of the Royalist party. 

[54I 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

It was his friend, Thomas Hutchinson, with the 
Revolution to become an exile, that moved the 
naming of the original Hall for him. Master 
Lovell, his eulogist, went off with the British to 
Halifax. Several of Faneuil's relatives also became 
refugees. A full-length portrait of him, which the 
grateful Town ordered painted and hung on the wall 
of the Hall, disappeared with the Siege. And the 
Faneuil mansion-house, which by 1772 had come 
Into the possession of a Royalist — that Colonel John 
Vassall, of Cambridge, whose mansion-house there 
became Washington's headquarters and the after-day 
home of Longfellow — was confiscated. 

Faneuil Hall was built on Town land, reclaimed 
from the tide, and when erected stood on the 
edge of the Town Dock and back of Dock Square. 
Over the dock In front of it a swing, or "turn- 
ing," bridge connected Merchants Row from King 
Street with "Roebuck's Passage" to North Street, 
and so to the North End. Roebuck's, where now 
Is the north part of Merchants Row, was a lane 
so narrow, only a cart's width, that teamsters 
were wont to toss up a coin to settle which should 
back out for the other, — or sometimes to tarry 
and argue the matter over their grog In Roe- 

[ 55] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

buck's Tavern, which gave the passage its name. 
The dock remained open till after the Revolution, 
when a portion of the upper part was filled in; 
but it continued to come up to near the Hall till 
the Town had become the City. Then, in 1824, 
the first Mayor Quincy originated a scheme of 
improvement in this neighborhood, and in a little 
more than two years he had carried it through, 
against the persistent opposition of his municipal 
associates, whose breaths its stupendousness quite 
took away. Thus where the dock had been, rose 
the long, architecturally fine, granite Quincy 
Market House. Also were opened six new streets, 
a seventh was greatly enlarged, and flats, docks, 
and wharf rights were obtained to a large extent. 
And what was more remarkable, as civic enter- 
prises go, this energetic, large-visioned Bostonian 
had the satisfaction of recording that all had 
been "accomplished in the center of a populous 
city not only without any tax, debt, or burden upon 
its pecuniary resources, but with large permanent 
additions to its real and productive property." 
So Quincy's name was added next to Faneuil's 
in the list of Boston's benefactors. 

Dock Square behind Faneuil Hall became early 

[ 56] 



Old State House and Faneuil Hall 

a market center. Here was the Saturday night 
meat market of Colony days to which customers 
were summoned by the cheerful clanging of a bell. 
In neighboring Corn Court was the colonial corn 
market. A few years before the erection of 
Faneuil's gift, the Town instituted a system of 
general market-houses, setting up three small 
establishments, the central one in this square, the 
other two at the then South End, bounded by our 
Boylston Street, and the North End, in North 
Square, respectively. At that time the townsfolk 
were sharply divided on the burning issue of 
markets at fixed points versus itinerant service, 
and in or about 1737 the central structure was 
pulled down by a mob "disguised like clergymen." 
It was after this performance, and when popular 
sentiment appeared to be drifting toward the 
fixed system, that Faneuil made his generous 
offer to build a suitable market-house on the 
Town's land at his own cost, on condition that the 
citizens legalize it and maintain it under proper 
regulations. But while the Town gave him an 
unanimous vote of thanks, the offer itself was dis- 
cussed at an all-day town meeting, and finally 
accepted by the narrow margin of only seven 

[ 57] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

votes. That Faneuil's scheme originally con- 
templated a market-house solely, and the addi- 
tion of a town-hall was an after suggestion of 
others, which was no sooner made than was 
cheerfully adopted by him, was greatly to his 
credit. And the unkind tradition that when the 
building was finished and the cost summed up, 
"Peter scolded a little", does not detract from 
the merit of his beneficence. 

The present bow-shaped Cornhill, picturesque 
with old shops and buildings, one or two re- 
constructed in colonial style, is an early nine- 
teenth-century thoroughfare, primarily cut through 
to connect Court and Tremont streets more 
directly with Faneuil Hall and its market. Its 
projectors called it Cheapside, after London's. 
In a little while, however, it took on the name 
of Market Street. Then a few years after the 
old Cornhill had disappeared with Marlborough, 
Newbury, and Orange, into Washington Street, 
it assumed the discarded, beloved name of the 
first link of the first High Waye through the 
Town. Early in its career it became a favorite 
place of booksellers' shops; and the old bookstore 
flavor hangs by it still. 

[ 58] 



Ill 

COPP'S HILL AND OLD NORTH (CHRIST) CHURCH 

REGION 

THE North End earliest became the most 
populous part of the Town as well as the 
first seat of Boston gentility, and about it longest 
clung the distinctive Old Boston flavor. This 
flavor remained, Indeed, well into the nineteenth 
century, long after its transformation into the 
foreign quarter it now essentially Is, a little Italy 
and a good-sized Ghetto, with splashes of Greece, 
Poland, and Russia. Mellow old Bostonians of 
to-day remember It as the fascinating quarter of 
the City down to the eighteen sixties, still re- 
taining. Intermixed with alien innovations, a faded, 
shabby-genteel aspect and delightsome Old Boston 
characteristics in its native residents and In its 
architecture. And there are a few venerable folk 
yet remaining who can recall Its appearance in 
the thirties as Colonel Henry Lee, that rare 
Boston personage of yesterday, has so charmingly 
pictured for us, — a "region of old shops, old 

[ 59] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

taverns, old dwellings, old meeting-houses, old 
shipyards, old traditions, quaint, historical, ro- 
mantic"; its narrow streets and narrower alleys 
"lined with old shops and old houses some of 
colonial date, with their many gables, their over- 
hanging upper stories, their huge paneled chim- 
neys, interspersed with aristocratic mansions of 
greater height and pretensions, flanked with out- 
buildings and surrounded by gardens"; clustered 
around the base of Copp's Hill, "the old ship- 
yards associated with the invincible *01d Iron- 
sides' and a series of argosies of earlier or later 
dates, that had plied every sea on peaceful or 
warlike errands for two hundred years. The sound 
of the mallets and the hand axes were still to 
be heard; the smell of tar regaled the senses; 
you could chat with caulkers, riggers, and spar 
makers, and other web-footed brethren who had 
worked upon these 'pageants of the sea', and 
you could upon occasion witness the launch of 
these graceful wonderful masterpieces of their 
skill." 

The old-time charm the foreign occupation has 
not altogether effaced. There still remain the 
narrow streets and narrower alleys, and most of 

[6ol 



Copfs Hill and Old North Church 

them have been permitted to retain their colonial 
or provincial names, as Salutation, Sun, Moon, 
Chair, Snowhill. Under the foreign veneer we 
may find a remnant of a colonial or provincial 
landmark; or, plastered with foreign signs, the 
battered front of some provincial worthy's dwell- 
ing. 

Copp's Hill, reduced in height and circum- 
ference and shorn of its spurs, is reserved by the 
protected burying-ground that crowns it. This 
ancient burying-ground, Christ Church at its foot, 
and the "Paul Revere house" in neighboring 
North Square, constitute the three and only lures 
of the conventional "Seeing Boston" tourist to 
this dingy part of the modern city. The lads of 
Little Italy who swarm about the stranger as 
he mounts the gentle incline of Hull Street and 
offer themselves "for a nickel" as guides, can 
tell you more, or much with more accuracy, of 
the show points of the locality, than the native 
born, for they have been well tutored by the 
school mistresses of the neighborhood schools, 
and are marvelously quick in absorbing things 
American. 

Though less "dollied up" than the other two 

[6i ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

historic graveyards — the King's Chapel and the 
Granary, in the heart of the city — this enclosure 
is quainter. It is made up of three or four bury- 
ing-grounds of different periods, intermingled and 
appearing as one. The oldest, which most in- 
terests us, is the northeasterly part bounded by 
Charter and Snowhill streets, back from the Hull- 
street entrance. It dates from 1660, which makes 
it in point of age next to the King's Chapel 
ground, the oldest of the three, with the Granary 
ground a close third, that dating also from 1660 
but a few months later than this. The part near 
Snowhill Street was reserved for the burial of 
slaves. In other parts are found numerous graves 
and tombs having monumental stones or slabs 
with armorial devices handsomely cut upon them; 
and some with quaint epitaphs. But in this, as in 
the other historic grounds, the stones in many 
instances do not mark the graves, for here and 
there in the laying out of paths stones were 
shuffled about remorselessly. And many graves 
are hopelessly lost, for in the dark days of the 
neglect of the place, stones were filched from their 
rightful places and utilized in the construction 
of chimneys on near-by houses, in building drains, 

[62] 




Copp's Hill Burying Ground 



Copf s Hill and Old North Church 

and even for doorsteps. Others were pulled up 
and employed in closing old tombs in place of 
rotted coverings of plank. There are also cases 
of changed dates, as 1690 to 1620, and 1695-6 to 
1625-6, more than five years before Boston was 
begun. These ingenious tricks were attributed 
to bad North End boys. A latter-day honest 
superintendent succeeded, through painstaking re- 
search, in recovering quite a number of the 
filched stones, and reset them in the ground, but 
with no relation to the graves they originally 
marked, for that was impossible. 

Popular historic features of the hill other than 
the burying-ground concern the Revolution. 
Young America loves to point to the site of the 
redoubt which the Britishers threw up at the 
Siege, whence Burgoyne directed the fire of the 
battery during the Battle of Bunker Hill, and 
whence were shot the shells that set Charlestown 
ablaze. This work was in the southwest corner 
of the burying-ground. Then the summit was con- 
siderably higher than now, and the side of the 
hill fronting Charlestown was abrupt. The Amer- 
ican schoolboy will tell you, too, how the British 
soldiers, during the Siege, amused themselves by 

[65 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

making targets of the gravestones in the old 
burying-ground; and how the tablet on the tomb 
of Captain Daniel Malcom, merchant, boldly 
inscribed "A true Son of Liberty, a Friend of the 
Publick, an enemy to Oppression, and one of the 
foremost in Opposing the Revenue Acts in 
America", was the most peppered with their 
bullets, and bears the marks of them to this day. 
In provincial times the hill was a favorite resort 
of the North Enders for celebrating holidays or 
momentous events. Tradition tells of monstrous 
bonfires on the summit on occasions of the receipt 
of great news. That in celebration of the sur- 
render of Quebec, when "forty-five tar barrels, 
two cords of wood, a mast, spar, and boards, 
with fifty pounds of powder" were set ofi^, must 
have been the grandest of its kind in Boston's 
history. At the same time a bonfire of smaller 
proportions, yet big, was made on Fort Hill. It 
is related that on this gloriously festive occasion 
there were provided, at the cost of the Province, 
as were the bonfires, "thirty-two gallons of rum 
and much beer." After the Revolution, on the 
seventeenth of June, 1786, when the Charles 
River bridge, the first bridge to be built from 

[66] 



Copf s Hill and Old North Church 

the Town to the mainland, was opened, guns were 
fired from where the British redoubt had been, 
simultaneously with the guns from Bunker Hill, 
while the chimes of Christ Church joined in a 
merry peal. 

Christ Church, dating from 1723, the second 
Church of England establishment in Boston, and 
the oldest church now standing in the city, we 
see newly and faithfully restored to its original 
appearance, its parish house refurbished, the 
churchyard brushed up and lined with fresh young 
poplars, and the whole under the protecting wing 
of the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Massa- 
chusetts. As a landmark of the Church of Eng- 
land in Puritan Boston, it is interesting to the 
churchman. But as a rare example of the so-called 
New England classic in architecture, it has a wider 
interest. In general outlines it follows Sir Chris- 
topher Wren's St. Anne's, Blackfriars. A sub- 
stantial body of brick, with side walls of stone 
two and a half feet thick, and the belfry-tower 
with walls a foot thicker, the structure surely 
gave warrant for the hope expressed in the 
prayer of the Reverend Samuel Myles, the devout 
rector of King's Chapel, at the laying of the 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

corner-stone: "May the gates of Hell never pre- 
vail against it." The original spire surmounting 
the tower, attributed to William Price, was blown 
down In an October gale In 1802, but the present 
one, built In 1807, from a model by Bulfinch, is 
said to be a faithful reproduction of it in pro- 
portions and symmetry. The tower chimes, com- 
prising eight sweet-toned bells, still the most 
melodious In the city, were hung In 1744, ^^<^ were 
the first peal brought to the country, from Eng- 
land, as the Inscription on one of them states — 
"we are the first ring of Bells cast for the British 
Empire in North America, A. R., 1744." Each 
bell tells Its own story, or records a date of the 
church, or a sentiment. Inscribed around Its 
crown. They were bought by subscription of the 
wealthy parishioners. A few years after their 
Installation, a guild of eight bell-ringers, all young 
men, was formed, one of whom is said to have 
been Paul Revere. The tablet on the tower front 
relates the story that Revere's signal lanterns 
that "warned the country of the march of the 
British troops to Lexington and Concord", were 
"displayed In the steeple of this church April 
18, 177s"; and the story is firmly fixed in the 

[68] 







if'W'' ■ 



m 

















am 









Christ Church 



Copf s Hill and Old North Church 

official guide to the church; yet there are those 
who question the statement, and as firmly fix in 
history the place of the lights to be the belfry 
or steeple of the genuine "Old North" Church — 
the meeting-house that stood in North Square till 
the Siege, when it was pulled down by the British 
soldiers and used for firewood. 

In the restored interior we find in place all 
the choice relics that embellished the provincial 
church, and of which the guide-books tell: the 
brass chandeliers, spoil of a privateersman; the 
statuettes in front of the organ, intended for a 
Canadian convent and captured by a Boston- 
owned privateer from a French ship during the 
French and Indian War of 1746, and presented by 
the privateer's commander, a parishioner; the 
"Vinegar" Bible, and the prayer-books bearing 
the royal arms, given by George II in 1733. And 
among the mural ornaments, — the bust of Wash- 
ington said to have been modeled from a plaster 
bust made in Boston in 1790, and the first memo- 
rial of Washington set up in a public place. 
Beneath the church and the tower are many 
tombs. In one of these was temporarily buried 
Major Pitcairn of the British Marines, he who 

[71 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

led the advance guard at Lexington and Concord 
with that cry, "Disperse, ye Rebels!" which 
brought upon that amiable gentleman-soldier, 
beloved of his men, the odium of the Americans, 
and who fell mortally wounded at Bunker Hill. 
The gruesome tale is told that when his relatives 
in England sent for his remains, and his monument 
was placed in Westminster Abbey, the perplexed 
sexton, unable to identify them, substituted an- 
other body, that of a British lieutenant who had 
resembled him in figure and height, which was 
duly forwarded as Major Pitcairn's. 

From the belfry of Christ Church, Gage wit- 
nessed the Battle of Bunker Hill. From the same 
point of view the Artist makes a picture of Bunker 
Hill Monument of to-day for our English guest. 

In North Square we are in the once fair center 
of provincial elegance completely metamorphosed. 
Save the colonial touch in the little old Paul 
Revere house, with projecting second story, and 
the colonial names of the diverging ways — Moon, 
Sun Court and Garden Court streets — all semblance 
of Oldest Boston is stamped out. Antiquary can 
only indicate the spots where "here stood"; 
imagination must do the rest. 

[72I 



Copf s Hill and Old North Church 

We remarked the Revere house as worth more 
than a passing glance merely as the dwelling-place 
of Longfellow's hero of the Revolution. It was 
old when Revere bought it in 1770, for it was 
built after the "great fire" of November, 1676, — 
the sixth "great fire" in the Puritan Town, — 
and, moreover, it replaces the house of Increase 
Mather, the parsonage of the First North Church, 
which went down with the meeting-house and 
nearly fifty other dwelling-houses, in that disaster. 
Revere moved here from Fish Street (Ann, now 
North) perhaps before 1770, and It was his home 
from that time till 1800, when, having prospered 
in his cannon and bell foundry, he bought a 
grander house on neighboring Charter Street, by 
Revere Place, where he spent the remainder of his 
days, and died in 1818. His foundry, which he 
established after the peace, was near the foot of 
Foster Street, not far from his Charter Street 
house. 

It was In the upper windows of this little, low- 
browed. North Square house that Revere dis- 
played those awful illuminated pictures upon 
the evening of the first anniversary of the "Boston 
Massacre", which as we read in the Boston 

[73 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

Gazette of that week, struck the assemblage 
drawn hither with "solemn silence" while "their 
countenances were covered with a melancholy 
gloom." And well might they have shuddered. 
In the middle window appeared a realistic view of 
the "Massacre." The north window held the 
"Genius of Liberty," a sitting figure, holding 
aloft a liberty cap, and trampling under foot a 
soldier hugging a serpent, the emblem of mili- 
tary tyranny. In the south window an obelisk 
displaying the names of the five victims stood 
behind a bust of the boy, Snyder, who was killed 
a few days before the affair by a Tory "informer" 
in the struggle with a crowd before a shop, 
"marked" secretly as a Tory shop to be boy- 
cotted; and in the background, a shadowy, gory 
figure, beneath which was this couplet: "Snider's 
pale ghost fresh bleeding stands. And Vengeance 
for his death demands!" Revere was indeed 
a stalwart patriot, but he was no artist, and the 
execution of these presentations may have con- 
tributed no small part to the gloom of the popu- 
lace contemplating them. 

We pointed out the site of the first North 
Church and its successor, built upon its ruins the 

[74] 



Copfs Hill and Old North Church 

year after the fire, which became the Old North 
— at the head of the square between Garden 
Court and Moon Streets. Nothing is preserved to 
us In picture or adequate description of either of 
these meeting-houses of the Second Church of 
Boston, which was formed In 1649, and for more 
than three-quarters of a century, from 1664, the 
pulpit of the famous Mathers — Increase; Cotton, 
son of Increase; and Samuel, son of Cotton. Al- 
though the house of 1677 was close upon a century 
old at the Revolution, It Is said to have been still 
a fairly rugged building, and Its destruction by 
the British soldiers for fuel during that cold 
winter of the Siege Is called wanton by the his- 
torians. The Church remained homeless, though 
not dispersed, from the beginning of the Siege to 
1779, when It acquired a meeting-house on 
Hanover Street near by. 

Increase Mather, after the burning of his house 
in the fire of 1676, built on Hanover Street, just 
below Bennett Street, and a remnant of this 
house, number 350, we may yet see, covered with 
foreign signs. Cotton Mather passed a part of his 
boyhood In the Hanover Street house. After he 
became the minister of the North Church, he 

[75] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

bought a brick mansion-house hard by, also on 
Hanover Street, which the first minister of the 
North Church, John Mayo, had occupied. Samuel 
Mather's house was on Moon Street. The tomb 
of the Mathers we saw in Copp's Hill Burying- 
ground. North Square was a military rendezvous 
during the Siege. Barracks were here, and the 
fine houses in the neighborhood were used as 
quarters for the officers. Major Pitcairn was oc- 
cupying the Robert Shaw mansion, which stood 
opposite Revere's little house, when he went to 
his fate at Breed's Hill. 

In Garden Court Street we pointed to the sites of 
two of those aristocratic mansions of which Colonel 
Lee spoke, in height and pretension overtopping 
their neighbors. These were the Hutchinson and 
the Clark-Frankland mansions, stateliest of their 
day, which have figured in romance and story. 
They formed, with their courtyards and gardens, 
the west side of the court. The Hutchinson's 
garden back of the house extended to Hanover 
and Fleet Streets. 

The Hutchinson mansion was built in 1710 for 
the opulent merchant, Thomas Hutchinson, father 
of the more eminent Thomas Hutchinson, historian. 






rrj "^ Ml' 













Bunker Hill Monument from the Be/fry of Christ Church 



Copp's Hill and Old North Church 

chief justice, royal governor; the Clark-Frankland 
followed two or three years after, built for William 
Clark, as rich a merchant as Hutchinson, and 
somewhat grander to outvie his neighbor. Clark 
died in 1742 and was buried in a grand sculp- 
tured vault in Copp's Hill Burying-ground, which 
some years after was taken possession of by a 
lawless sexton who caused his own name to be 
inscribed above the merchant's; and when he 
came to die his humbler remains were deposited 
in the merchant's place. 

The Clark-Frankland mansion acquired Its hy- 
phenated title after Clark's day, with its purchase 
in 1756 by Sir Harry Frankland, gallant and fa- 
vored, great-grandson of Frances Cromwell, daugh- 
ter of the Protector, who chose to be collector of 
Boston rather than governor of the Province 
when George H offered him his choice, and who 
became the lover of lovely Agnes Surriage, maid 
of the Fountain Inn in old Marblehead, the 
heroine of Holmes' ballad and Bynner's novel. 
Here Sir Harry brought the beautiful girl, now 
his wife, and the handsome pair richly entertained 
the gentry of the Town, with the assistance of 
Thomas, the French cook, mention of whose 

[79I 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

hiring at fifteen dollars a month Sir Harry makes 
in his diary. They lived here but one short year, 
when Sir Harry was transferred to Lisbon, this 
time as consul. After his death, in England, in 
1768, the Lady Agnes returned to Boston and to 
this mansion, and remained till the outbreak of 
the Revolution. The story of the gallant cour- 
tesies that attended her leaving the Town at the 
Siege is one of the prettiest of the incidents of 
that troublous time. After the Siege, she went 
back to England, and presently married a country 
banker and lived serenely ever after, till her death 
in 1783. 

The Hutchinson mansion was the birthplace of 
Thomas Hutchinson, 2d, and here, and at his 
country-seat in the beautiful suburb of Milton, 
he lived through his whole career, till his departure 
to England in June, 1775, before the Battle of 
Bunker Hill, to report to the king the state of 
affairs in Boston, never to return, but to die there 
in exile yearning for his old home. That he meant 
to be true to Boston, to which he was devotedly 
attached, is now beyond question. In this Garden 
Court house, Hutchinson wrote his "History of 
Massachusetts," and when the mansion was 

[ 80] 



Copf s Hill and Old North Church 

wickedly sacked by the anti-Stamp Act mob, on 
an August night of 1765, his priceless manu- 
scripts were scattered about the court with his 
fine books and other treasures; but, happily, a 
neighbor gathered them up, and so they were 
saved. The two mansions lingered till 1833, when 
the widening of Bell Alley as an extension of 
Prince Street swept them away. Colonel Lee 
remembered them in their picturesque decadence 
festooned with Virginia creeper. 

Returning from the North End by way of 
Hanover Street, we make a detour through short, 
winding Marshall Lane — the sign foolishly says 
Street — which issues on Union Street, and was 
originally a short cut from Union Street to the 
Mill Creek which connected the North, or Mill, 
Cove, with the Great Cove. Here, set into the 
corner building above the sidewalk, we come upon 
the "Boston Stone, 1737", a familiar provincial 
landmark. It is the remnant, we explain, of a 
paint mill brought out from England about the 
year 1700 and used by a painter who had his 
shop here. The round stone was the grinder. 
The monument was placed after the painter's 
day, in imitation of the London Stone, to serve 

[ 81 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

as a direction for shops in the neighborhood. 
The painter's shop was known as the "Painter's 
Arms" from his carved sign fashioned after the 
arms of the Painter's Guild in London, and still 
preserved as an ornament, set in the Hanover 
Street face of the corner building, on the site of 
the shop. A similar guide post, called the 
"Union Stone", was at a later day placed at the 
Union-street entrance of the lane, before the low, 
brick, pitch-roofed, little eighteenth-century build- 
ing we see yet lingering on the upper corner here. 
This house was in latter provincial times Hope- 
still Capen's fashionable dry goods shop, in which, 
in his handsome youth, Benjamin Thompson of 
Woburn, later to become the famous Count 
Rumford, and named with Benjamin Franklin as 
"the most distinguished for philosophical genius 
that this country had produced", was an ap- 
prenticed clerk quite popular with the lady cus- 
tomers. 

Turning into Union Street, and so to Hanover 
Street again, we pass the site, somewhere in the 
street-way at this junction, of the dwelling and 
chandlery shop of Josiah Franklin, Benjamin 
Franklin's father, at the sign of the Blue Ball, 

[ 82] 




The Paul Revere House, North Square 



Copf s Hill and Old North Church 

where Benjamin spent his boyhood. The land- 
mark remained till the late eighteen fifties, when 
it disappeared with a widening of Hanover Street. 
But the Blue Ball still remains, an honored relic 
in the Bostonian Society's collection in the Old 
State House. On Union Street, across Hanover, 
where is a tunnel station, we have the site of a 
famous Revolutionary landmark — the Green 
Dragon Tavern, headquarters of the patriot 
leaders; where the "Tea Party" was organized; 
where later met the North End Caucus, chief of the 
political clubs that gave the name caucus to 
our American political nomenclature; the rendez- 
vous of the night patrol of Boston mechanics 
instituted to watch upon British and Tory move- 
ments before Lexington and Concord. The 
Green Dragon was also the first home of the 
Freemasons, when, in 1752, the pioneer St. 
Andrew Lodge was organized, and, in 1769, the 
first Grand Lodge of the Province, with Joseph 
Warren — the Warren who fell at Bunker Hill — 
as master. 



[85 ] 



IV 

THE COMMON AND ROUND ABOUT 

"TT^OR their domestic amusement, every after- 
JL noon after drinking tea, the gentlemen and 
ladies walk the Mall and from thence adjourn to 
one another's houses to spend the evening — those 
that are not disposed to attend the evening lec- 
ture , which they may do, if they please, six 
nights in seven the year round. What they 
call the Mall is a walk on a fine green Common 
adjoining to the southwest side of the Town. It 
is near half a mile over, with two rows of young 
trees planted opposite to each other, with a fine 
footway between in imitation of St. James's Park; 
and part of the bay of the sea which encircles 
the Town, taking its course along the northwest 
side of the Common — by which it is bounded 
on the one side, and by the country on the other 
— forms a beautiful canal in view of the walk." 

This dainty picture of the early eighteenth- 
century Common, and the earliest picture we have 

[87] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

of Boston Common in any detail, was recalled 
as we three sauntered on to the beautiful preserve 
of to-day of nearly fifty acres in the heart of the 
city, entering from the busy Tremont and Park 
streets corner amidst the throngs in continuous 
passage to and from the Subway stations. It is 
the Englishman Bennett's picture, our English 
visitor was told, of Boston Common as he saw it, 
presumably about the year 1740. The Mall he 
portrays so engagingly as the Town's social 
promenade, is the Mall alongside Tremont Street. 
When Bennett wrote, this was the only Mall, as 
it had been in Colony days, when the visiting 
Josselyn pictured the rustics with their "mar- 
malet-madams" perambulating the Common of 
evenings "till the Nine a Clock Bell rings them 
home to their respective habitations"; and it re- 
mained the only one till after the Revolution. 
West of it the whole reserve was used as the 
military training field and pasturage for cattle, 
for which it was originally set apart at the be- 
ginning of Boston. Or, as is recorded on the 
handsomely framed tablet we observe against the 
Park Street fence at the entrance, with the pur- 
chase of the whole peninsula in 1 634, save his 

[88 1 



/ 



The Common and Round About 

home-lot of six acres on Beacon Hill, from the 
hospitable Englishman, Blaxton, in comfortable pos- 
session here when the colonists arrived. 

The Mall in Bennett's time, with its double row 
of young elms, was finished off with a few syca- 
mores at the northerly end and poplars at the 
southerly end, all set out only a few years before. 
Beyond these, save one solitary elm in the middle 
of the Common, and a great one, — for there are 
legends of the hanging of witches, if not of 
Quakers, from its rugged branches, — the reserve 
was treeless; and it remained practically so through 
the Province period. A picture of the date of 
1768 shows the "Great Elm" and a lonely sapling 
far out in the open. Until a few years before 
Bennett saw it, the Common had no fences. The 
front fences, set up in 173 3-1 734, and 1737, were 
railings along the easterly and northerly sides. 
These were the fences that the British soldiers 
encamped on the Common used for their camp- 
fires during the Siege; the trees were saved from 
destruction by Howe's orders, at the earnest 
solicitation of the selectmen, and especially of 
John Andrews, who lived near by, an act for which 
the Bostonians were, or should have been, grate- 

[ 89] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

ful. An inner fence, parallel with the inner row 
of elms, protected the Mall from the grazing field. 
From the outset the trees on the Mall were care- 
fully guarded by the townsfolk, and orders were 
occasionally passed in Town meeting whipping up 
the selectmen to protect individual trees when 
threatened. The year that the inner row on 
the Mall was planted, 1734, a Town meeting 
order offered a reward of forty shillings to the 
informer against any persons guilty of cutting 
down or despoiling any tree then here or that 
might be planted in the future. The protection 
of the Common from injury or abuse was a matter 
of concern in the earliest times. Orders appeared 
in the sixteen fifties against "annoying" the 
Common by spreading "trash", or laying any 
carrion or other "stinkeing thing" upon it. Thus 
we see a wholesome solicitude for the Common, 
and a lively sense of its value is an inheritance 
from Old Boston. Yet it barely escaped ruin 
more than once in old days. In its very first 
year an attempt to have it divided up in allot- 
ments was only frustrated through the action of 
Governor Winthrop and John Cotton. After the 
Revolution, the disposal of a considerable part 

[90] 



The Common and Round About 

of it to be cut up into lots was checked by the 
personal exertion of that John Andrews who saved 
the trees during the Siege. 

The fence of 1734 on the easterly side was at 
first provided with openings opposite the streets 
and lanes entering Tremont — then Common 
— Street, "Blott's Lane", our Winter Street, West 
Street, and "Hogg Lane", Avery Street. Very 
soon, however, these openings were closed up by 
a Town meeting order, because the Common had 
become "much broken and the herbage spoiled by 
means of carts &c. passing and repassing over it," 
and a single entrance for "carts, coaches, &c." 
out of Common Street, provided at the northerly 
side where is Park Street. After the Revolution, 
in 1784, when great improvements in various parts 
of the Common were begun, at the cost of a fund 
subscribed by generous townsmen for the purpose, 
the fences were restored, and a third row of elms 
was planted on this Mall. But the larger im- 
provements, the laying out of other malls and of 
cross paths, and systematic tree-planting in the 
open, giving the enclosure a more general park 
aspect, were all after the second decade of the nine- 
teenth century. The spacious Beacon Street Mall 

[91 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

was the first of the new esplanades, laid out in 
1815-1816; and the magnificent breadth and 
sweep of it, greatly to the credit of the broad- 
visioned designers and their artistic sense, was the 
model for the others that followed. When told 
that the Beacon Street Mall was paid for from a 
subscription raised in 18 14 for the purpose of 
providing for the defense of Boston against a 
contemplated English attack, which was n't made, 
in the War of 1812, our Englishman observed, 
with a twinkle of eye, that it was a much finer 
disposition of the money. The Park Street and the 
Charles Street Malls followed in 1 822-1 824, the 
first Mayor Quincy's time; and the Boylston Street 
Mall in 1836, thus completing the encircling of 
the Common by malls. At that time the iron 
fence was placed, and parts of it still remain on 
three sides. The handsome gates forming part 
of this extensive structure long ago disappeared, 
to the sorrow of many citizens. The handsome 
Boylston Street Mall was destroyed by the build- 
ing of the Subway in the eighteen nineties. The 
Tremont Street Mall was also sadly despoiled at 
the same time, magnificent English elms falling 
under the axe, to mournful dirges of hosts of 

[92] 



^^\^!^ i^ 













:'^^ ;^> ' ^p" - 



On the Common, Showing Park Street Church 



The Common and Round About 

Bostonians. And after the completion of the 
Subway beneath it, sapient city authorities bereft 
the Mall of its old distinctive name of Tremont 
Street, and, in a burst of belated patriotism, 
substituted that of Lafayette; because, forsooth, 
that well-beloved Frenchman passed by the Mall 
along Tremont Street with the escorting proces- 
sion, upon his memorable visit in 1824. 

The integrity of the Common rests first, on the 
order of the Town, March 30, 1640, declaring 
that "henceforth" no land within the reservation 
as then defined be granted "eyther for house- 
plotts or garden to any pson"; second, on an order 
of May 18, 1646, prohibiting the gift, sale, or 
exchange of any "common marish or Pastur 
Ground" without consent of "y« major p* of 
y* inhabitants of y« towne": thus preserving the 
power of control of the Common with the legal 
voters; and, third, on a section of the city charter 
reserving the Common and Faneuil Hall from 
lease or sale by the city council, in whose hands 
the care, custody, and arrangement of the city's 
property were placed. The title is in the deposi- 
tion of the four "ancient men", in 1684, the 
essence of which is the inscription on the tablet 

[95] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

at the Park Street entrance. In the absence of a 
recorded title, if any were given by Blaxton, this 
deposition was obtained after the annulment of 
the Colony Charter, when the proprietors under 
that instrument were threatened with loss of 
their estates, on the pretext that their grants 
had not passed under the charter seal. The four 
"ancient men" were among the last survivors of 
the first comers. The Common's bounds originally 
extended on the easterly side across the present 
Tremont Street to Mason Street, opening from 
West Street; and northward as far as Beacon 
Street, including the square now bounded by 
Park, Tremont and Beacon streets. Thus it is 
seen the Granary Burying-ground and Park Street 
were taken from it. 

So much for the topographical history of the 
Common. While we were dutifully outlining this 
history, the Englishman was absorbing the ex- 
quisite vistas from Park Street Church up Tre- 
mont Street and the Mall; and from the meeting- 
house up Park Street to the noble old Bulfinch 
front of the State House. Then he turned toward 
the meeting-house itself — the "perfectly felicitous 
Park Street Church," as Henry James calls it — 

[96] 



The Common and Round About 

and admired the beauty of its site as the focal 
center of rich city vistas, and its "values" as an 
architectural monument, the grace of its composi- 
tion, its crowning feature of tower and tall, 
slender, graceful steeple recalling Wren's St. 
Bride's, Fleet Street. 

While this church Is less a monument of Old 
Boston than the Old South, King's Chapel, and 
Christ Church, it is classed with the historic 
group because of its associations, as remarkable 
in their way as those of the others, and on ac- 
count of its character as one of the finest types 
of the few remaining examples of the colonial 
church architecture. It dates from 1 809-1810, 
erected for the church founded In 1808 to revive 
Trinitarianism, and directly to combat the Uni- 
tarian invasion which, starting with the estab- 
lishment of King's Chapel, after the Revolution, 
as the first Unitarian church in America, had 
overwhelmed all the Orthodox churches in Boston 
except the Old South. Channing was then 
preaching In the Federal Street Church; William 
Emerson, the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
in the First Church; John Lathrop in the Second 
Church; Charles Lowell, James Russell Lowell's 

[97] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

father, in the West Church; John Thornton 
Kirkland in the New South, to go from that 
pulpit in 1 8 ID to the presidency of Harvard; 
while in 1805 Henry Ware, Sr., a pronounced 
Unitarian, had been duly made Hollis Professor of 
Divinity in the Divinity School. The old Cal- 
vinism was preached with such fervor in the new 
Park-Street that local wits early christened the 
angle it faces "Brimstone Corner", by which 
name it has been affectionately called ever since. 
Yet it is the coldest of Boston corners, and around 
it the harsh wintry winds swirl and snap and 
sting, and the proposal of Thomas Gold Appleton, 
rare coiner of Boston mots in his day, that the 
city fathers tether a shorn lamb here, is counted 
with the happier of Boston sayings. 

The architect of the church was Peter Banner, 
an Englishman then ranking locally with Bul- 
finch, while the capitals of the beautiful steeple 
were designed by Solomon Willard, a native 
American architect, the designer of Bunker Hill 
Monument, next in prominence after Bulfinch. 
Only six years before the church was erected 
Park Street had been laid out and built, from 
plans by Bulfinch. This street had been from 

[98 ] 



The Common and Round About 

Colony times a lane called "Gentry", or " Sentry", 
because it led to Beacon Hill (the highest peak 
of which early had that name) and it had been 
lined with grim old public buildings — the Granary 
at th£ lower end; the Workhouse and Bridewell; 
and the Almshouse at the upper end at Beacon 
Street (which, by the way, started humbly as 
"the lane leading to the almshouse"). Among 
these the Granary was unique. It was a paternal 
institution established by the town authorities in 
or about 1662 to supply grain to the poor or to 
those who desired to buy in small quantities, at 
an advance on the wholesale price of not more 
than ten per cent. A committee for the purchase 
of the grain, and a keeper of the Granary, were 
appointed annually by the selectmen. The build- 
ing, a long, unlovely, wooden thing, had a capacity 
of some twelve thousand bushels. It was first 
set up on the then upper side of the Common 
within the plot occupied by the Granary Bury- 
ing-ground, but in 1737 was removed to this 
corner. Then the burying-ground, which before 
had been called the South, took on its name. 
The Granary went out of service with the Revolu- 
tion, and became a place of minor town offices 

[99] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

and small shops. These buildings were done 
away with, and Park Street was begun in 1803 
as a dignified approach to the new Bulfinch 
State House which had been erected in 1795. 
Where the Workhouse and Bridewell had been, 
appeared in 1 804-1 805 a row of fine Bulfinch 
houses. In 1804 in place of the old gambrel- 
roofed Almshouse rose an expansive mansion- 
house of the favored provincial type, built for 
Thomas Amory, merchant. Then the church 
replaced the Granary, handsomely finishing the 
entrance corner. Of the Bulfinch houses we see 
two or three yet remaining, transformed for busi- 
ness purposes. They were the homes at one time 
and another of Bostonians of leading. The at- 
tention of the Englishman was pointed to that 
numbered 4 as interesting from its association 
with the Quincy family. It became the home of 
the first Mayor Quincy after his retirement from 
the presidency of Harvard in 1854, and was oc- 
cupied by him through the rest of his long and 
useful life, which closed in June, 1864, in his 
ninety-third year. His next door neighbor, at 
Number 3, was Josiah Quincy, Jr., the second 
Mayor Quincy, whose term covered the years 

[ 100 1 



T^he Common and Round About 

1 846-1 848. Number 2, now rebuilt, was the last 
Boston house of John Lothrop Motley, in 1868- 
1869, prior to his appointment as United States 
minister to England. Number 8, now the spacious 
home of the Union Club, was originally the town 
house of Abbott Lawrence of the distinguished 
Boston brother merchants, "A. & A. Lawrence", 
and minister to the Court of St. James, appointed 
in 1849. Of the Amory house that replaced the 
Almshouse we also see a remnant reconstructed 
for business, and so happily as to retain some- 
thing of its old-time air. It was the house which 
Lafayette occupied as the guest of the city during 
his stay in Boston on his visit of 1824. The part 
on Park Street (it was made with extensions into 
two and then four dwellings after Amory's time) 
has an added interest as the home of the scholarly 
George Ticknor from 1830 till his death in 1871, 
where in his handsome library overlooking the 
Common he leisurely wrote his "History of 
Spanish Literature", the work upon which he was 
engaged for twenty years. 

It was going down this famous Park Street, we 
rather slyly told the Englishman, that Charles 
Sumner relieved Thackeray of a bundle that, true 

[ loi 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

to his insular tradition, he was loath to carry. 
"The story itself may be only a tradition", an- 
swered the Englishman. 

On Tremont Street alongside the Mall — or 
Common Street as this part of the way con- 
tinued to be called till the Town had become the 
City — houses were scant when Bennett wrote in 
1740. Even when Park Street Church was built, 
there were only two houses on the street of more 
than one story, it is said. The first estate of note 
here appears to have been of the middle province 
period. It comprised a mansion-house on the 
Winter Street corner with a spacious garden 
extending down Winter Street and back of the 
present Hamilton Place. This seat certainly had 
notable associations. It was occupied by the 
troublesome royal governor, Sir Francis Bernard, 
during a part at least of his term from 1760 to 
his recall in 1769. During the Siege, it was one 
of the several headquarters of Earl Percy. After 
the Revolution, in 1780, it came into the posses- 
sion of Samuel Breck, a Boston merchant of 
wealth and some distinction, who largely im- 
proved it. Then, as described in the "Recollec- 
tions" of his son Samuel, it was, "for a city 

[ 102 ] 







li$m'£M^^'^^ 






Sr^f^-i:^i 



On Boston Common Mall in front of old Saint Paul's 



The Common and Round About 

residence", "remarkably fine", with an acre of 
ground around the house divided into kitchen 
and flower gardens. While the Brecks had the 
place, the flower gardens were kept In neat order 
and, open to public view through a "palisade of 
great beauty", were the admiration of all. The 
"Recollections" tell of a fete in these gardens 
given by the elder Breck on the news of the birth 
of the dauphin. "Drink", they relate, was dis- 
tributed from hogsheads, while "the whole town 
was made welcome to the plentiful tables within 
doors." Mr. Breck, removing to Philadelphia, In 
1792 sold the estate to his brother-in-law, John 
Andrews, — the same of whom we spoke as the 
principal saver of the trees on this Mall at the 
time of the Siege, — also a Boston merchant of 
standing; and thereafter Mr. Andrews was its hos- 
pitable occupant till his death some years later. 
This Andrews was an unconscious contributor to 
local history, through a bundle of letters, racy 
and vivid, that he wrote from Boston during the 
Siege, which in after years came into the pos- 
session of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 
They give the most intimate details of affairs 
and life In the beleaguered Town that we have in 

[ 105 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

the chronicles of that time. He was then occupy- 
ing a house on School Street just below the foot- 
passage to Court Square: and the day after the 
Evacuation he entertained Washington at a dinner 
there. 

On Winter Street, midway down, the site now 
marked by a tablet attached to the Winter 
Place side of the great store of Shepard, Norwell 
Company that covers it, was the house which 
Samuel Adams occupied during the last twenty 
years of his life, and where he died. This had 
been a royalist house and so confiscated. The 
house in which the patriot leader lived in the pre- 
Revolutionary period, and where he was born, was 
toward the water front, near Church Green. Dur- 
ing the Siege it was practically ruined. 

Where St. Paul's stands and the towering shops 
which frame and dwarf it, was another late 
provincial estate that rivaled the Breck-Andrews 
place in extent, spreading between Winter and 
West streets. After the Revolution this was for 
a while known as the Swan place, from Colonel 
James Swan, its owner at that time, a remarkable 
man. He had been a merchant, a member of 
the "Boston Tea Party", soldier of the Revolu- 

[ io6] 



"The Common and Round About 

tion, friend of Lafayette, speculator. Going to 
Paris, he had made a fortune there and lost it. 
After a brief season at home he returned to 
Paris, and engaging in large ventures during and 
after the French Revolution, acquired another 
fortune. Then he spent the last twenty-two years 
of his life in a French prison for a debt ''not of 
his contracting", and one which he deemed un- 
just. With constant litigation, judgment was 
finally in his favor, but he died a day or two after 
his release. Subsequent to the Swans' day, 
mansion-house and estate were transformed into 
the "Washington Gardens", a Boston Vauxhall, 
with its little amphitheater, or circus, its games, 
and other mildly alluring attractions. The Gar- 
dens were first opened for performances in July, 
1815, and flourished for a considerable time. 

St. Paul's Church, now the Episcopal Cathedral, 
dates from 18 19-1820, and, counting King's 
Chapel, was the fourth Episcopal church to be 
built in Boston. Its founders were a group of 
men of wealth and prominence in the commu- 
nity, mostly parishioners of Trinity, the third 
Episcopal organization, founded in 1728, only 
five years after Christ Church; the edifice was 

[ 107 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

then on Summer Street, north side, near Wash- 
ington Street. Their purpose was to erect a 
costly and architecturally impressive church build- 
ing; and when their Grecian-like temple of stone 
was finished, it seemed to them, as Phillips Brooks 
has said, "a triumph of architectural beauty and 
of fitness for the Church's service." It was the 
first monument in the Town of the Greek revival 
in architecture. The architects were Alexander 
Parris, an American engineer-architect, who after- 
ward built the Quincy Market House; and Solo- 
mon Willard. Willard carved the Ionic capitals. 
It was planned to fill the pediment with a bas- 
relief representing Paul preaching at Athens, but 
the fund was insufficient to meet the expense of 
the work. Therefore, the rough stone we see was 
put in temporarily, to become a permanent fix- 
ture. In one of the tombs beneath the church 
Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill, was first buried, 
the remains afterward being removed to Forest 
Hills Cemetery in Roxbury, his birthplace. In 
another was interred the historian Prescott. 

In 1810-1811 appeared "Colonnade Row", the 
most notable embellishment of the way before the 
erection of St. Paul's — a range of twenty-four 

[ 108 ] 



The Common and Round About 

handsome brick houses, designed by Bulfinch, ex- 
tending from the south corner of West Street to 
the opening of Mason Street upon the thorough- 
fare. The name of Colonnade was given the 
row from the columns supporting a second-story 
balcony along the front, which constituted a strik- 
ing feature of most of the houses. The elegance 
of their design and their superb situation, over- 
looking the Mall and the Common's expansive 
green to the open bay and the hills beyond, made 
them Inviting to families of means; and Colonnade 
Row was at once admitted to the best society. 
After Lafayette's visit, the name was changed, 
in the Frenchman's honor, to "Fayette Place"; but 
this was retained only about a dozen years, when 
the old one was restored. The range held their 
ground as stately dwellings into the eighteen 
sixties. Then slowly one by one they were made 
over for business uses. Parts of facades of a 
few of them we yet discern in the present line 
of varied architecture. At the end of the Mall 
and looking across to the Hotel Touraine, we have 
the site of the modest mansion-house in which 
President John Quincy Adams sometime lived, 
and where was born his son, Charles Francis 

[ 109 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

Adams, minister to England during the Civil 
War. 

In the old days the train bands at muster 
spread all over the preserve with this Mall as 
the coign of vantage, we observed, as we three 
now turned into a side path to cross malls and 
paths trending westward. On the annual muster 
day in October, the Mall was lined with booths 
and tents for the sale of enticing edibles and 
drinkables — egg-nog, rum punch, spruce beer. 
Jollity and fun reigned throughout that holiday, 
albeit in Colony times the trainings opened and 
closed with prayer. All the i train bands of the 
town and county were assembled. The line 
was formed alongside of the inner fence of the 
Mall and extended from Park Street to the Bury- 
ing-ground here on the south side. There being 
no trees to interfere, the military evolutions occu- 
pied the whole field. Grand reviews filled up the 
morning hours, and the afternoon was devoted to 
sham fights. The fights were performed on the 
present parade ground on the west side. The 
training field remained the whole preserve till the 
nineteenth century. It was reduced to the limits 
of the parade ground in the eighteen fifties. 

[ no ] 



ill IM 




Jcross the Frog Pond to the old houses of Beacon Hill 



'The Common and Round About 

The pasturage continued open till 1830; then the 
cows were finally banished. 

Of the colonial tragedies of the Common we 
could point to no definite landmarks. Just 
where the "witches" were hanged, and the 
Quakers, cannot to-day be told. Even that the 
Quakers were hanged anywhere on the Common is 
now a question. Mr. M. J. Canavan, one of 
the most thorough of latter-day delvers into the 
truths of Boston's history, and whose dictum on 
any nice point is accepted as authoritative, has 
thrown the Dry-as-dusts into dismay with the 
assertion that the four Quakers were hanged on 
Boston Neck, and seemingly proving it. Till 
Canavan spoke, the Dry-as-dusts were as sure 
that the Common was the place of their hanging 
as that they were hanged. Nor can we fix 
exactly the spot where the Indian, son of Matoonas, 
was hanged for murder in 1671, and where "a 
part of his body was to be seen upon a gibbet for 
five years after." Nor precisely the place of the 
execution by shooting, in 1676, of brave old Ma- 
toonas himself, for his participation in King 
Philip's War, betrayed into the authorities' hands 
by tribal enemies, who were permitted to be his 

[ 113 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

executioners. It can only be said that these, and 
the many other spectacular executions of men and 
women in the grim old days on this fair Green, 
were performed generally, if not invariably, on 
its western side. At first, it appears, the gallows 
was at or about the solitary "Great Elm," and 
afterward was placed nearer the bottom of the 
Common, where the victims were hastily buried 
in the loose gravel of the beach there. We may 
imagine the scene of the hanging of the "witches" 
in 1648 and 1656, from gallows on the knoll 
neighboring the "Old Elm", the site of which we 
find occupied by a descendant, and marked by a 
tablet. There were only two sacrifices to the 
witchcraft delusion here in Boston, and eight 
years apart; but the victims, as at Salem thirty- 
six and forty-four years later, were both women 
of talents above the common, and the delusion 
was deep-seated. After the first victim, Margaret 
Jones, had breathed her last, it was gravely 
recorded that "the same day and hour she was 
executed there was a very great tempest at 
Connecticut which blew down many trees, &c." 
Perhaps it was at the solitary "Great Elm" that 
Matoonas was shot, for we read that he was 

[ 114] 



The Common and Round About 

"tied to a tree." Maybe the holiday Ancient 
and Honorable warriors perform their evolutions 
on the parade ground on Artillery Election day, 
the first Monday of June, over the graves of the 
executed band of Indian prisoners, some thirty of 
them, of King Philip's War. Or again, maybe they 
march and countermarch over the place where 
fell the British grenadier shot for desertion in 
1768, the two British regiments then quartered 
in Boston "being present under arms." On the 
parade ground, too, may have been the spectacle, 
after the Province had become the Common- 
wealth, of the hanging of Rachel Whall for high- 
way robbery, which consisted in the snatching of 
a bonnet from the hand of another woman and 
running off with it. 

Of the romances of the Common that daintiest 
love scene — the proposal of the Autocrat to the 
schoolmistress on the long mall running from 
Beacon Street Alall at the Joy Street entrance, 
across the Common's whole length to the Boylston- 
Tremont Streets corner — is recalled by the re- 
cently placed sign we observe at the head of this 
mall: "Oliver Wendell Holmes Path." "We 
called it the long path and were fond of it. I 

[ 115 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

executioners. It can only be said that these, and 
the many other spectacular executions of men and 
women in the grim old days on this fair Green, 
were performed generally, if not invariably, on 
its western side. At first, it appears, the gallows 
was at or about the solitary "Great Elm," and 
afterward was placed nearer the bottom of the 
Common, where the victims were hastily buried 
in the loose gravel of the beach there. We may 
imagine the scene of the hanging of the "witches" 
in 1648 and 1656, from gallows on the knoll 
neighboring the "Old Elm", the site of which we 
find occupied by a descendant, and marked by a 
tablet. There were only two sacrifices to the 
witchcraft delusion here in Boston, and eight 
years apart; but the victims, as at Salem thirty- 
six and forty-four years later, were both women 
of talents above the common, and the delusion 
was deep-seated. After the first victim, Margaret 
Jones, had breathed her last, it was gravely 
recorded that "the same day and hour she was 
executed there was a very great tempest at 
Connecticut which blew down many trees, &c." 
Perhaps it was at the solitary "Great Elm" that 
Matoonas was shot, for we read that he was 

[ 114] 



The Common and Round About 

"tied to a tree." Maybe the holiday Ancient 
and Honorable warriors perform their evolutions 
on the parade ground on Artillery Election day, 
the first Monday of June, over the graves of the 
executed band of Indian prisoners, some thirty of 
them, of King Philip's War. Or again, maybe they 
march and countermarch over the place where 
fell the British grenadier shot for desertion in 
1768, the two British regiments then quartered 
in Boston "being present under arms." On the 
parade ground, too, may have been the spectacle, 
after the Province had become the Common- 
wealth, of the hanging of Rachel Whall for high- 
way robbery, which consisted in the snatching of 
a bonnet from the hand of another woman and 
running off with it. 

Of the romances of the Common that daintiest 
love scene — the proposal of the Autocrat to the 
schoolmistress on the long mall running from 
Beacon Street Mall at the Joy Street entrance, 
across the Common's whole length to the Boylston- 
Tremont Streets corner — is recalled by the re- 
cently placed sign we observe at the head of this 
mall: "Oliver Wendell Holmes Path." "We 
called it the long path and were fond of it. I 

[ IIS 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably 
robust habit) as we came opposite the head of 
this path on that morning. I think I tried to 
speak twice without making myself distinctly 
audible. At last I got out the question, — Will 
you take the long path with me? — Certainly, — 
said the schoolmistress, — with much pleasure. — 
Think, — I said, — before you answer; if you take 
the long path with me now, I shall interpret it 
that we are to part no more! — The schoolmis- 
tress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if 
an arrow had struck her. One of the long granite 
blocks used as seats was hard by, — the one you 
may still see close by the Gingko tree. — Pray, sit 
down, — I said. — No, no, she answered softly, — 
I will walk the long path with you!" From the 
Autocrat's day the mall has held Holmes' happy 
title. The hard old granite seat has long since 
gone, but the Gingko tree remains. 

At the Spruce Street entrance from Beacon 
Street we pass to Beacon Hill. 



[ 116I 



OVER BEACON HILL 

AS we were strolling down the Beacon Street 
Mall while the Englishman remarked the 
charm of the Beacon Street border largely of old- 
time architecture, disfigured though it is in spots 
by the intrusion of incongruous reconstruction, the 
Artist recalled the earliest extant painter's sketch 
of the Common, of a date some sixty years after 
Bennett's pen picture, which includes this border. 
It is a water color representing the Common and 
Beacon Street as they appeared in or about 1805- 
1806, when the making of Park Street was under 
way, and the development of Beacon Hill west of 
the new Bulfinch State House into a fair urban 
West End, was progressing. Although the border 
was occupied in part in the Province period our 
guest was told that no piece of provincial archi- 
tecture is seen in the line. The oldest dates back 
only to 1 804-1 805, about the period of this 
painting. Several pieces are of the second decade 

[ 117] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

of the nineteenth century. Others are examples 
of the spacious Boston domestic architecture of 
the eighteen thirties. 

From its first occupation the border was a 
favored seat of Boston respectability. When Ben- 
nett wrote in 1740 two seats were here, one at the 
head of the line, the other at the foot. The 
street was then a lane through the Common ''and 
so to the sea" — the Back Bay, the bound of this 
side of the Common then being the hill. The 
house at the head was the mansion of Thomas 
Hancock, uncle of the famous John, then new, it 
having been erected in 1737, and pronounced one 
of the most elegant in Town. At the foot or back 
on the hill slope, were "Bannister's Gardens", 
the estate of Thomas Bannister, merchant — or 
at this time of his heirs — occupying the six- 
acre home-lot of William Blaxton, the first 
planter, which he reserved from the sale of the 
peninsula to the inhabitants. Between these two 
places the hill spread out much as in its primitive 
state. The Hancock mansion was the first house 
to be erected on the top of the hill west of the 
summit, or the highest of the three peaks. The 
mansion-house stood in solitary grandeur with no 

[ 118 1 



Over Beacon Hill 

near neighbor westward for some thirty years. 
Then in or about 1768 John Singleton Copley, 
the painter, built here, setting his house midway 
down the line, about where we see the distin- 
guished double-swell front stone house, now the 
home of the Somerset Club, originally the early 
nineteenth-century mansion-house of David Sears, 
merchant, eminent in his day. Copley at this time 
was at the height of his prosperity as the court 
painter of Boston gentility; and upon his fortunate, 
and happy, marriage in 1769 with Miss Susanna 
Clarke, the fifth daughter of Richard Clarke, a 
wealthy merchant, agent of the East India Com- 
pany in Boston, and later one of the consignees 
of the tea which the Bostoneers threw overboard, 
he acquired a large part of the hill west of the 
Hancock holdings, including the Blaxton six-acre 
lot which had passed from the Bannisters. Thus 
Copley became the holder of the largest private 
estate in the Town — a rare distinction for a 
painter of that day, or of any day. 

From that time till after the Revolution the 
border was occupied for the most part by the 
Hancock and Copley places alone. Copley's 
house has been attractively described as a com- 

[ 119] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

fortable roomy wooden mansion, or rather coun- 
try house, of colonial yellow, lacking the elegance 
of its grander neighbor but refined, with pleasant 
gardens, ample stable and outbuildings. Copley 
called his domain "The Farm." In this house he 
painted some of his best portraits. Trumbull, 
the younger painter, in his familiar description of 
a call upon him here, pictures him engagingly as 
the prosperous painter and social light. Copley 
left this house and went to England in 1774 with 
his father-in-law, never to return to Boston or to 
the country, although his heart was with the 
American cause. A year later, on the edge of 
the Siege, his family also sailed and joined him 
there. After the Revolution General Harry Knox 
occupied the yellow mansion for a season, and 
here portly Madam Knox, in her slimmer years 
the toast of the Continental army officers as the 
American Beauty, gave sumptuous dinners. Then 
in 1795, upon the selection of a site on the hill- 
top, west of the summit — the Hancock cow pas- 
ture — for the Bulfinch State House, and the 
beginning of its erection, the Copley domain was 
acquired by two astute Bostonians, Harrison 
Gray Otis and Jonathan Mason, who saw in the 

[ 120 ] 



'4>^:'^. 
















Dome of the State House, and site of the old John Hancock House 



Over Beacon Hill 

establishment of the new State House here their 
opportunity for a profitable real estate operation 
on a large scale. On their subsequent union of 
interests with two others, owners of contiguous 
lands, began the transformation of the hill from 
a place of fields and pastures Into a sumptuous 
residential quarter. In course of time the emi- 
nence was graded, West Hill, or Mount Vernon, the 
third peak, on the western side, was cut down, 
and the new West End of pleasant streets and fair 
dwellings rose, bringing fortune to the syndicate, 
and renown to Beacon Hill. 

The picture of 1 805-1 806 shows, at the head of 
the Beacon Street line, the new Bulfinch State 
House, completed in 1798. Next west facing the 
street In a row, appear the Hancock mansion- 
house, carriage-house, and stable. At this time 
the mansion was occupied by Madam Scott, John 
Hancock's widow, who had married one of his 
ship masters. Captain James Scott, and was dis- 
pensing the hospitality of the house as graciously 
If not so lavishly as In Governor John's day. 
The estate was yet one of the largest and finest 
In Town. When Thomas Hancock died in 1764 
it comprised, with the mansion-house and various 

[ 123 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

outbuildings, gardens, orchards, nurseries, and 
pastures; and extended along Beacon Street to the 
present Joy Street, back over the hill to Mt. 
Vernon and Hancock streets, and over the site 
of the Bulfinch State House to the summit. All 
this he devised to his widow, along with his 
"chariots, chaises, carriages, and horses", and 
"all my negroes", and with a neat sum of money, 
making Lydia Hancock, daughter of a Boston 
bookseller, the richest widow that had to that 
day ever lived in Boston. She died in 1777, when 
the estate passed by her will to John Hancock, 
her favorite nephew, who maintained it in all its 
glory and made it historic, till his death in 1790. 
He died intestate, having been able on his death- 
bed to dictate only the minutes of a will, in which, 
it is said, he gave the mansion-house to the 
Commonwealth . 

It remained much in its original state a re- 
spected landmark long after the upbuilding of 
the lands about it. At length, in 1863, heroic 
efforts of citizens to secure its reservation by 
the State as a permanent memorial having failed, 
it was demolished, to the keen regret of all Bos- 
tonians even to the present day. Its site is 

[ 124 ] 



Over Beacon Hill 

marked by the two imposing heavy-faced houses 
of the brown-stone period of domestic architecture, 
near the unique foot passage of Hancock Avenue 
alongside the State House grounds. The upper 
one is now a publishing house, the first of a 
succession of old-time mansions along the line 
transformed, without marring their rare fagades, 
into book-producers' headquarters, which suggests 
the colloquial title of "Publishers' Row." The 
houses next below the two brown-stones, occupy- 
ing the remainder of the front of the old Han- 
cock estate to the Joy Street corner, are all of 
early nineteenth-century date and associated with 
the names of famous Boston merchants. The 
mansion at the corner was sometime the seat of 
George Cabot, distinguished in his day in public 
as in mercantile life and as the astute head of 
the Essex Junto. Just below the lower Joy 
Street corner we have pictured in the 1 805-1 806 
water color, a neat wooden house with pillared 
front, and of a "peach-bloom" color. This was 
erected before 1792 as the country seat (for this 
part of the Town was counted suburban at that 
time) of Doctor John Joy, one of the owners of 
land contiguous to the Copley domain who be- 

[ 125 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

came a member of the syndicate that developed 
the hill. His estate occupied the block between 
Joy and Walnut streets, and extended back up 
the hill to Mt. Vernon Street. The peach-bloom 
house remained till 1833, when It was removed, 
and upon the estate were erected three houses on 
the Beacon Street front, and four on Joy Street, 
all of which, save one, are still retained, good 
examples of the highest type of the Boston swell- 
front. The first of the three on Beacon Street, 
which the present apartment-house, the Tudor, 
replaces, was occupied successively by merchants 
of distinction — Israel Thorndike; Robert Gould 
Shaw, grandfather of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, 
commander of the first negro regiment recruited 
at the North In the Civil War, whose memorial 
by Saint Gaudens we have seen at the head of 
the mall facing the street; and Frederick Tudor, 
the "Ice king," who first Introduced Ice Into the 
tropics and made a fortune In the adventure. 

"No", the Englishman who had heard the 
legend was answered, "It was not he who was the 
recipient of George Ill's hearty reception at 
court, — 'Eh? Tudor? One of us?' It was his 
father, Judge Tudor, friend of Washington, and 

[ 126] 



Over Beacon Hill 

of his staff." In the other two of these three 
houses have also Hved notable merchants. So, 
too, were highly respected merchants the first 
occupants of the houses next below to the Wal- 
nut Street corner, both of an earlier date — 
erected about 1816. The first was the seat of 
Samuel Appleton, till his death in 1853 at the 
age of eighty-seven; the corner one, of Benjamin 
P. Homer. Next in the picture appears a brick 
mansion-house of quiet dignity, on the lower 
Walnut Street corner. This we see yet standing, 
presenting a side to Beacon Street instead of the 
front as originally, the front door having been 
shifted to the Walnut Street side when the lane 
that became Walnut Street was widened. It is 
distinguished as the oldest of all now on the line. 
It was built in 1 804-1 805 by John Phillips, 
lawyer, a Bostonian by family connections dis- 
tinctively of the Boston "Brahmin" class, at 
that time the Town advocate and public prosecu- 
tor, afterward first mayor of the city; but of 
wider name as the father of Wendell Phillips, who 
was born in this house in 181 1. At a later period 
it was a Winthrop house, the house of Lieutenant- 
governor Thomas L. Winthrop, accomplished gen- 

[ 127 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

tleman, but, like the estimable John Phillips, 
generally known as the father of a more dis- 
tinguished son, Robert C. Winthrop. 

This Is the last house In the line shown In the 
picture of 1 805-1 806. The two next below it, rich 
examples of the distinctive Boston type, date from 
1 8 16. The upper one was originally the mansion 
of Nathan Appleton, merchant and manufac- 
turer, younger brother of William Appleton; the 
other, of Daniel P. Parker, a large shipowner in 
his time. Of the David Sears stone mansion we 
have spoken. That next but one below, the brick 
mansion with yellow porch and luxuriant mantle of 
woodbine and wistaria, dates from the eighteen- 
twentles, originally built for Harrison Gray Otis, 
his second mansion erected on the Copley domain, 
and designed to combine elegance and comfort. 
Here Mr. Otis, one of the most courtly of Bos- 
tonians, lived the remainder of his gentlemanly 
life, dispensing, we are told, a refined hospitality. 
He died in 1848. Originally between the Sears 
and Otis mansions was a beautiful garden. The 
house next below was long the seat of Eben D. 
Jordan, one of the earliest of Boston's retail 
"merchant princes." 

[ 128 ] 



Over Beacon Hill 

At the Spruce Street entrance where we turn 
from the mall for the stroll over the hill, we are 
opposite the site of the first Boston house and the 
seat of the first Bostonian, in which Winthrop 
and his associates at their coming found the ami- 
able and cultivated Englishman so agreeably es- 
tablished, surrounded by his garden of English 
roses, his orchard growing the first American 
apple, and close by the "excellent spring" of 
which he had "acquainted" Winthrop when cour- 
teously "inviting and soliciting" the governor to 
come over from Charlestown and settle on his 
peninsula. 

The pioneer cottage is supposed to have stood 
on or just back from this Beacon Street line 
somewhere between this Spruce Street and Charles 
Street; while the six-acre home-lot extended back 
up the hillside over what are now Chestnut 
Street, Mt. Vernon Street, and Louisburg Square 
to Pinckney Street. It is a fascinating picture 
which the historians have given us of this first 
Boston seat and of this first Bostonian. Blaxton 
had been living here alone some six years before 
the coming of the colonists, bartering with the 
Indians for beaver skins for trading, cultivating 

[ 129 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

his garden and orchard, browsing among his books 
of which he seems to have had good store, and 
in neighborly communion with the three or four 
other EngHshmen then established on islands in 
the harbor and on the near mainland, who had 
come out as he had with Robert Gorges in 1625. 
He was well born, a graduate of Emanuel, the 
Puritan college, Cambridge, with his degree of 
Bachelor of Arts in 161 7, and Master of Arts in 
162 1. Though a nonconformist "and detesting 
prelacy," he still adhered to the Church of Eng- 
land, continuing to wear his canonical coat. For 
a while after the settlement had begun he was 
little disturbed, probably because of the remote- 
ness of his seat from the Town center on the 
harbor front, and lived along amicably with the 
Puritans. But at length his independent spirit 
rebelled, and he declared, so the tradition runs, 
"I came from England because I did not like the 
Lords Bishops, but I cannot join with you because 
I could not be under the Lords Brethren." So, 
after the sale of his rights in the peninsula, with 
the exception of the home-lot, he bought a stock 
of cows with the sum he received, thirty pounds, 
and moved off again Into the wilderness. His new 

[ 130 ] 






j\r f. 



^^:-[»t 



m 



\4I' '^-^^^JS^-^^^^^^^^ 




•V ] 






tV- -'(Ss^^.i^ 






Colonial Doorway and Lamp on Mount Vernon Street 



Over Beacon Hill 

home was established in Rhode Island on the 
banks of the river which afterward took his name 
— spelled Blackstone. He, however, retained 
pleasant relations with his Boston friends, and 
some years after his withdrawal he married in 
Boston a Puritan widow. He seems to have been 
a kindly gentleman, fond of nature and a lover 
of animals; and there is declared to be historical 
proof for the quaint story that he trained a moose- 
colored bull to bit and bridle and saddle. 

It is felicitous, our Englishman agreed, that the 
neighborhood of the home of this scholarly first 
Bostonian should have in after years become the 
favorite dwelling-place of men of letters, and 
the literary workshop of modern Boston. On the 
home-lot site, on this Beacon Street line, lived 
William H. Prescott during the last fourteen 
years of his life, his house being the upper 
of the two with pillared porticoes, we see 
below Spruce Street, Number 55. Here he pre- 
pared the greater part of his histories of the 
Spanish conquest when almost blind. On the 
cornice of his library-room were fixed those 
"crossed swords" to which Thackeray alludes in 
the opening lines of "The Virginians" — the 

[ 133 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

swords borne by Prescott's grandfather, Colonel 
Prescott, the commander at the Battle of Bunker 
Hill, and by his wife's grandfather. Captain Lin- 
zee, the commander of the "Falcon," one of the 
British warships in the same engagement. These 
crossed swords, our Englishman was told, are now 
to be seen similarly attached to a library wall in 
the house of the Massachusetts Historical So- 
ciety, to which they were given after Prescott's 
death. Also on the home-lot site, back of the 
Prescott house, on Chestnut Street, Number 50, 
Francis Parkman lived for twenty-nine years, 
during which appeared all of the seven volumes 
of his "France and England in North America." 
Nearly opposite Parkman's, at Number 43, lived 
the poet Richard Henry Dana for more than forty 
years of his long life of ninety-one years, which 
closed here in 1876. 

Higher up, at Number 17, lived the poet-preacher, 
Cyrus A. Bartol, for more than sixty years of his 
almost as long life, which closed in his eighty- 
eighth year in 1900. Doctor Bartol's house, and 
Number 15, his next door neighbors' and kins- 
folks' — the Reverend and Mrs. John T. Sargent, 
both leaders in their time in "advanced thought" 

[ 134] 



Over Beacon Hill 

— were the meeting places alternately of the 
Radical Club. This club was the descendant of 
the Transcendental Club of the forties in which 
sparkled such lights as Emerson, George Ripley, 
the founder of "Brook Farm," and Margaret 
Fuller. At Number i6 John Lothrop Motley 
lived in the late forties and early fifties. Lower 
down, at Number 33, John G. Palfrey resided 
in the early sixties, but in the late sixties his 
home was in Louisburg Square. On West Cedar 
Street, opening from Chestnut Street down the 
hill, at Number 3, the "poet for poets," and 
translator of Dante, Doctor T. W. Parsons, dwelt 
for some time in his latter years with his brother- 
in-law, George Lunt, a poet of the eighteen fifties, 
and his sister, Mrs. Lunt, writer of graceful 
lyrics. Sometime after the Lunts' day Henry 
Childs Merwin, one of the small group of high 
ranking modern American essayists, occupied this 
house. At the upper corner of West Cedar and 
Mt. Vernon streets Professor Percival Lowell, the 
astronomer, who has made Mars so neighborly, 
dwells and works. 

In Louisburg Square, at Number 2, William 
Dean Howells lived when editing the Atlantic 

[ 135] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

Monthly. Number lo was the home of Louisa M. 
Alcott In her latter prosperous years, and here 
her remarkable father, A. Bronson Alcott, passed 
in comfort his last days and serenely died. On 
Mt. Vernon Street, above Louisburg Square, at 
Number 83, William Ellery Channing lived during 
the latter years of his choice life, which closed in 
1842. On the opposite side, at Number 76, 
Margaret Deland wrote the novels that first 
brought her fame. Later she was domiciled farther 
down on the hillslope, at Number 112. At the 
top of the hill, the house Number 59, with clas- 
sic entrance door, was the last home of Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich. Earlier Aldrich had lived at the 
foot of the hill, on Charles Street, Number 131, 
now forlorn, then fair and beautiful with rich borders 
of shade trees — near neighbor of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes at Number 164, and James T. Fields, 
Number 148. His first home in Boston, to 
which he came to live in 1867, was the *' little 
house on Pinckney Street," of his pleasant de- 
scription — Number 84, on the slope toward 
West Cedar Street. 

On Pinckney Street up the slope have lived at 
different periods: John S. Dwight, master music 

[ 136 1 







^'w;^^.^^^^ 







iMiV 



n^. 



Number y^j4 Pinckney Street 



Over Beacon Hill 

critic, editor of Dwight's Journal of Music (1852- 
1881), at Number 66', George S. Hillard, choice 
literary critic and essayist in the forties and 
fifties, at Number 62 in his latter years, earlier 
at Number 54, where Hawthorne was much a 
guest, and perhaps lived for a while with his 
friend (and whence, by the way, Hawthorne 
directed that unique letter to James Freeman 
Clarke, in July, 1842, engaging the good minister 
to marry him to Sophia Peabody, but without 
naming place or date); Louise Imogen Guiney, 
poet and essayist, at Number 16, before her re- 
moval to Oxford, England; Edwin P. Whipple, 
critic and essayist of leading in his time, and one 
of the literary lecturers most sought during the 
flourishing days of the "Lyceum" (he is said to 
have lectured more than a thousand times), at 
Number 11, near the head of the street. This 
was Whipple's house for nearly forty years, till 
his death in 1886. His working study was a 
pleasant room on the second floor delightfully 
cluttered with books. In this house now refash- 
ioned is fittingly the literary workshop of Miss 
Alice Brown, story writer and prize play winner. 
In this quarter, built up after London models 

[ 139 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

with local variations — Chestnut Street of archi- 
tectural refinement, embellished with doorways 
that Bostonians term colonial; quaint Acorn Street, 
a single carriage-width and with a single line of 
old style toy houses; reserved Louisburg Square; 
narrow Pinckney Street of variegated archi- 
tecture and gentility; stately Mt. Vernon Street 
mounting from the river over the hill to the 
State House Archway and, as Henry James whim- 
sically pictures, "fairly hanging there to rest, 
like some good flushed lady of more than middle 
age, a little spent and 'blown'", — here in this 
mellow quarter, with the London flavor yet 
lingering about it, our Englishman remarked that, 
like Daniel Neal's "gentleman from London" a 
century back, he felt "almost at home" as he 
observed its character and its houses. 

In Chestnut Street his attention was especially 
called to the group of three houses. Numbers 13, 
15, and 17 — the Bartol house and its neigh- 
bors — for their architectural interest, and also 
because they were the first houses built on this 
street, and were the gifts of their builder, Madam 
Hepsibah Swan, one of the four composing the 
syndicate that developed this West End, to her 

[ 140 ] 



Over Beacon Hill 

three married daughters, in about 1810. Madam 
Swan was the wife of that remarkable Colonel 
James Swan of whose mansion-house on Tremont, 
then Common, Street beside the Common, we 
have spoken. On Mt. Vernon Street the upper 
line of broad-breasted, spacious mansions of a 
past sumptuous style, set back from the public 
sidewalk in aristocratic seclusion, impressed our 
guest as the distinguishing note of the street. 
The fine old colonial mansion with pebble-paved 
courtyard, the third in the group of three houses 
next this block and just above Louisburg Square, 
the Englishman was told, was the first mansion- 
house that Harrison Gray Otis erected for his own 
occupation on the Copley purchase, and dates 
from about 1800. In Louisburg Square he was 
pointed to the central enclosure bedecked with 
tall trees, and toy statues at either end, as the 
place of Blaxton's "excellent spring." 

There was the "dark side" of the hill, the 
slope north of Pinckney Street, that we did not 
penetrate, for the atmosphere that once gave this 
side peculiar distinction has gone, and it is no 
longer interesting, or over-clean. It was the 
" dark side " from the free negro settlement occu- 

[ 141 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

pylng the north slope below Myrtle and Revere 
Streets before the Civil War and after, and as a 
center of anti-slavery agitation. The line between the 
haven of self-satisfied middle-classism on the south 
side and the north side residential quarter with 
Its colored fringe, was sharply drawn. Fifty or 
sixty years ago over and on the hill's brow in 
comparative obscurity were nurtured the seeds 
of anti-slavery and abolitionism later to bloom so 
terribly. After dark in the eighteen forties and 
fifties these little streets must have reeked with 
sedition against respectability. It was in the 
schoolroom of the little negro church on Smith 
Court off Joy (then Belknap) Street, and below 
Myrtle Street, that on that bitter cold, snowy 
January night, in 1832, the New England Anti- 
Slavery Society was organized by the small band 
who had been barred out of Faneuil Hall, when 
Garrison uttered his memorable prophecy: "We 
have met here to-night In this obscure school- 
house; our numbers are few and our influence 
limited; but mark my prediction. Faneuil Hall 
shall ere long echo with the principles we have 
set forth. We shall shake the Nation by this 
mighty power." The little meeting house was 

[ 142 ] 

r 



Over Beacon Hill 

the scene of many more abolition meetings, and 
it might have been mobbed had it not been of 
stout brick. It yet stands in the Httle court, but 
is now, and long has been, a Jewish synagogue. 

At the head of Mt. Vernon Street as we ap- 
proached the Archway we crossed the gardens of 
the old Hancock place, or the site of them, be- 
tween Hancock Avenue and Hancock Street. The 
Archway is a quite modern affair, we observed, 
and marks great changes made in the topography 
hereabouts. It dates back only to 1 889-1 895, with 
the erection of the State House Annex, the second 
addition to the Bulfinch Front, and preserving the 
traditions of the original structure, beneath which 
it passes. Before that time Mt. Vernon Street con- 
tinuing, as the Archway now carries it, to the 
farther side of the State House, there took a 
sharp turn to the right and passed into Beacon 
Street nearly opposite the head of Park Street. It 
was then lined with fine houses, mostly Boston 
swell-fronts. From its north side at the turn 
opened Beacon Hill Place, a delightful foot passage 
to Bowdoin Street, bounded by three aristocratic 
houses, all historic from the character of their 
occupants at different periods. These pleasant 

[ 143 ] \ 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

houses and street lines were swept off to make 
way for the Annex, and for the park at the side, 
State House Park. Also went down the Beacon 
Hill Reservoir, a massive fortress-like structure on 
the Hancock Street line, facing Derne Street, with 
noble arches on its front, built in 1849, and called 
in its day the noblest piece of architecture in the 
city. The Annex and the space at its park side 
mark the site of the summit, or highest of the three 
peaks of the hill; while the pillar of stone topped 
with an eagle which we see in the park facing 
Ashburton Place, is a duplicate of the monument 
that last crowned the peak in place of the beacon 
of Colony and Province days — the monument of 
Bulfinch's design erected in 1790-1791, the first 
in the country to commemorate the Revolution. 
The peak remained unshorn, a beautiful grassy 
cone-shaped mound, behind the Bulfinch Front 
reaching almost as high as the gilded dome now 
reaches, till 181 1. It was cherished then as it 
had been from Colony days as the crowning glory 
of the Town. A visit to its top for the fine view 
which it commanded was the finishing feature of 
the round of Boston sights. On pleasant summer 
evenings gay dinner or supper parties at the 

[ 144 ] 



Over Beacon Hill 

houses in its neighborhood were wont not infre- 
quently to adjourn to the lookout for enjoyment 
of the moonlight, the gentle zephyrs, and flirta- 
tious communion. The approach to it from the 
Alt. Vernon Street side was through a turnstile 
to a flight of steps leading part way up and join- 
ing a broad path in which convenient footholds 
had been worn. The way from Derne and 
Temple streets was direct to the monument by 
Beacon Steps, so called. The hill cutting begin- 
ning in 1811 occupied a dozen years, and was 
fittingly called "the great digging." To-day the 
cutting into the park to make way for the twen- 
tieth-century State House wing, occupies, with the 
employment of the steam shovel in place of the 
hand-digger, not much more than a dozen days. 
With the completion of this wing, and its com- 
panion on the west side, greater changes will have 
been effected in this quarter; and, alas! Beacon 
Hill, which now alone retains in its richness the 
old Boston flavor, will have lost more of its 
earlier charm. 



[ 145 ] 



VI 

THE WATER FRONT 

WE traced the old Town front of the "con- 
venient harbor" as best we could, through 
a ramble along the present marginal thoroughfares 
of Commercial Street and Atlantic Avenue, be- 
tween Copp's Hill at the north and the site of 
Fort Hill at the south. Between these bounds, 
and within "two strong arms" reaching out at 
either end of the Great Cove, the inner harbor 
lay through Colony and Province days. The 
strong arms were the North Battery on "Merry's 
Point" at the foot of Copp's Hill, and the Boston 
Sconce, or South Battery, on a point jutting out 
from Fort Hill. The North Battery commanded 
the mouth of Charles River; the Sconce protected 
the sea entrance. An additional defense at the 
sea end was a fort on the summit of Fort Hill, 
while the "Castle", on Castle Island, where now 
Fort Independence Park is connected with the 
Marine Park system on South Boston Point, was 

[ 147] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

the outer protector. Of these defenses the fort 
on Fort Hill was first erected, begun in the Town's 
second year; the Castle next, in 1634; then the 
North Battery, in 1646; and lastly the Sconce, 
in 1666. Seven years later, in 1673, these bat- 
teries were connected by a "Barricado", a sea 
wall and wharf of timber and stones, built in a 
straight line upon the flats before the Town across 
the mouth of the Great Cove, with openings at 
intervals to allow vessels to pass inside to the 
town docks. Its purpose was primarily to secure 
the Town from fire ships, in case of the approach 
of an enemy; but it was also intended for wharf- 
age, and it came early to be called the "Out 
Wharves." As a defense, the Barricado proved 
needless, for no hostile ship ever passed the Castle 
till the Revolution; it began to fall into decay 
early in the Province period, although it was re- 
tained for some years longer. The batteries, 
however, were steadily kept up and supplied with 
sufficient forces of men, till the Revolution was 
over. These were the defenses of Colony days. 
In the Province period, a battery was planted at 
the tip end of Long Wharf, the great pier stretch- 
ing into the harbor nearly half a mile, built in 

[ 148 ] 



The Water Front 

1 710, and the wonder of its day. Bennett, in 
1740, found this battery here. The North Battery 
is now marked by Battery Wharf on Commercial 
Street at the foot of Battery Street; the Sconce, 
by Rowe's Wharf, at the foot of Broad Street; 
the Barricado, by Atlantic Avenue, which fol- 
lows generally its line; while Fort Hill is repre- 
sented by Independence Square — or Fort Hill 
Square, as the official title is — and reached from 
Rowe's Wharf and Atlantic Avenue through nar- 
row old Belcher Lane, dating back to the sixteen 
sixties, the "Sconce Lane" of early Province days. 
The harbor front of Old Boston, therefore, ex- 
tended from hill to hill, a distance of less than a 
mile, as the Englishman was shown by the 
Boston: A Guide Book map when given the fore- 
going details. Meanwhile the Artist had produced 
a copy of the familiar picture by Paul Revere — 
"A View of Part of the Town of Boston in New 
England and British Ships of War Landing their 
Troops, 1768" — which represents the water front 
of the Province period in more definite detail 
and in livelier manner than any other sketch 
or map of its time. Of the front's appearance in 
Colony days there is no picture. 

[ 149 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

We enter the present front between the old 
bounds from the North End Terrace opposite the 
Charter-street side of Copp's Hill Burying-ground, 
and so toward the North End Beach. Thus from 
the terrace we have a view across the river to 
the Navy Yard; while beside the beach, artificially 
restored a few years ago, we are close by the 
supposed landing place of Winthrop's company 
moving over from Charlestown, and especially of 
Anne Pollard, then a "romping girl", who, ac- 
cording to legend, was the first of all, or rather 
the first "female", to spring ashore. This pre- 
sumed first landing place was below Hudson's 
Point, then near the junction of Charter and 
Commercial streets, east of Charles River Bridge, 
and the extreme northwest point of the Town. It 
got its name from Francis Hudson, a worthy fish- 
erman, one of the early ferrymen of the Charles- 
town ferry, which plied from this point. Turning 
southeastward, along Commercial Street, we soon 
come upon the ancient Winnisimmet-Chelsea- 
Ferry, at the foot of Hanover Street, one of the 
forgotten memorials of two centuries back. In 
spite of attempts to abolish it, this Institution 
still lives and ferries in a mild way. 

[ 150] 



<■; 






^^"^^^^^^^11 . Hh f ill 



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J 

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mn 



Old Loft Buildings, Commercial Wharf 



The Water Front 

Next beyond the ferry entrance we are at old 
Constitution Wharf, and read the inscription on a 
stout brass plate attached to the face of the heavy 
brick warehouse on the sidewalk line: "Here was 
built the Frigate Constitution. Old Ironsides." 
That was in 1 794-1 797. Here was then the great 
shipyard of Edmund Hartt, one of three broth- 
ers — all Boston shipwrights. The capabilities of 
Boston at that time for the construction and 
equipment of ships as exemplified in the building 
of this famous battle frigate are remarked by the 
local historians. The copper, bolts, and spikes, 
drawn from malleable copper by a process then 
new, were furnished from Paul Revere's works. 
The sails were of Boston manufactured sail cloth, 
and were made in the old Granary building. The 
cordage came from Boston ropewalks, of which 
there were then fourteen in the Town. The gun- 
carriages were made in a Boston shop. Only the 
anchors and the timber were "imported." The 
anchors were from the town of Hanover, Ply- 
mouth County; the oak from Massachusetts and 
New Hampshire woods. Subsequently, Hartt 
built other ships for the young American navy 
before government dockyards were established, 

[ 153 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

and his place came to be called "Hartt's Naval 
Yard." Notable among these productions was 
the frigate Boston^ launched In 1799, so named 
because she was provided for by subscription of 
Boston merchants and was a free gift to the 
government. Another was the brig Argus, built 
in 1800, which distinguished herself In the War 
of 181 2, but was finally captured by an English 
war brig of twenty-one guns against her sixteen. 
Warships were built In other Boston yards about 
Copp's Hill before the Constitution was turned out. 
The first seventy-four gun ship built In the coun- 
try, ordered by the Continental Congress, was 
laid in Benjamin Goodwin's yard, near the North 
Battery. Forty years earlier the Massachusetts 
Frigate was built for the province, In Joshua Gee's 
yard, at the foot of the hill, not far from Snowhill 
Street. She was designed for Sir William Pep- 
perell's expedition against Louisburg In 1745 

At that period Joshua Gee's was one of several 
thriving shipyards in this neighborhood, turning 
out all sorts of vessels. In 1759 six were recorded 
as clustering about the base of Copp's Hill; while 
two were at the other end of the water front 
below Fort Hill. In Colony days, yards here 

[ 154] 







The last of the Fishing Fleet at old T. Wharf 



The Water Front 

were almost as numerous. Two or three were 
producing handsome ships for foreign trade so 
early as the sixteen forties and fifties. Conven- 
iently close by were famous taverns. There was 
the Ship Tavern, or Noah's Ark, on the corner 
of North, then Ann, and Clark streets, dating 
back to before 1650, and lingering as a landmark 
till the eighteen sixties. And the Salutation Tav- 
ern, or the Two Palaverers, from the sign of two 
painted gentlemen in small clothes and cocked 
hats greeting each other, on Salutation Alley from 
Hanover Street to Commercial Street, of later 
date than the Ship. 

When the keel of the Constitution was being 
laid, in November, 1794, Pemberton writes, in 
his "Description of Boston": "The harbor of 
Boston is at this date crowded with vessels. 
Eighty-four sail have been counted lying at two 
of the wharves only. It is reckoned that not less 
than four hundred and fifty sail of ships, brigs, 
schooners, and sloops and small craft are now in 
port." As for shipbuilding, he tells of its having 
formerly been carried on at upwards of twenty- 
seven dockyards at one and the same time. He 
was credibly informed, he wrote, that in all of 

[ 157] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

these yards there had been more than sixty vessels 
on the stocks at one time. Many, when built, 
were sent directly to London with naval stores, 
whale oil, etc., and to the West Indies with 
fish and lumber and rum. The whale and cod 
fishery employed many of the smaller craft. 
"They were nurseries and produced many hardy 
seamen," Pemberton truly says. 

We pass Battery Wharf, now a steamship pier; 
pass the entrance to the East Boston North 
Ferryways; other wharves, now steamship piers; 
Eastern Avenue, leading to the East Boston South 
Ferry; then, at Lewis Wharf, pause a moment 
to drop into history a bit. For here, on what is 
now its north side, was Hancock's Wharf of 
Province days, and earlier Clark's, the most im- 
portant wharf on the water front till after the 
building of Long Wharf in 1710. And here was 
where the Great Cove started on the north side, 
carrying high-water mark originally up our State 
Street to the line of Merchants Row and Kilby 
Street, as we remarked on our initial ramble. 

The wharf was first Thomas Hancock's, then 
John Hancock's by inheritance. John Hancock's 
warehouse was upon it, while his store was at the 

[ 158] 



■.,7 't 













^ ^/V £/■«>/</ Lc>;/g Wharf 



The Water Front 

head of what is now South Market Street; or, as 
described in an advertisement in the Boston 
Evening Post of December, 1764, "Store No. 4 
at the East End of Faneuil Hall Market." Here 
he was offering for sale "A general Assortment of 
English and India Goods, also choice Newcastle 
Coals and Irish Butter, cheap for Cash." It was 
at this wharf that one of the British regiments 
landed in July, 1768, as in Paul Revere's picture. 
In the previous June occurred the performance 
of the unloading in the night of a cargo of wines 
from the sloop Liberty from Madeira, belonging 
to John Hancock, without paying the customs, 
while the "tidewaiter" upon going aboard the 
ship, was seized by a ship captain and others 
following him, and confined below. Riotous pro- 
ceedings followed the next day, upon the seizure 
of the sloop and upon its mooring for safety under 
the guns of a British warship in the harbor. The 
incensed populace turned upon the revenue offi- 
cers, smashed the windows of the house of the 
comptroller on Hanover Street near by; and finally 
dragged the collector's boat to the Common and 
there burnt it in a bonfire. Hancock was prose- 
cuted upon this and many other libels for penal- 

[ 161 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

ties upon acts of Parliament, amounting, it is said, 
to ninety or a hundred thousand pounds sterling. 
On Commercial Wharf we note the side range of 
low-studded, heavy granite buildings, typical of 
the early nineteenth-century merchants' counting- 
houses that customarily lined the principal wharves. 
Here we enter the water-front market region. 

At T Wharf, now the old fish pier, we are at 
what was originally a part of the Barricado of 
1672. The neck of the T connecting it with Long 
Wharf we are told is of that structure. T is the 
oldest of the present wharves. Andrew Faneuil 
and Stephen Minott are of record as owners in 
1718; but Minott was an earlier owner, and the 
wharf was for some time called "Minott's T." 
With the fleet of fisher boats moored at its side, 
it is the most picturesque and animated of all 
the wharves in the line. Its glory is passing now, 
however, with the shift of fishing interests to the 
new docks of the great Commonwealth Pier on the 
South Boston side. Long Wharf is the aristocrat 
of the line. It was projected in 1707, when the 
flats of the Great Cove had been filled on King 
Street below Merchants Row to about where 
now is the Custom House, — a pier to extend from 

[ 162] 



The TFater Front 

the then foot of the street to low-water mark, 
some seventeen hundred feet out; and the scheme 
was carried through by a group of merchants as 
a private enterprise. Daniel Neal thus described 
it in 17 19, nine years after its completion: a 
"noble Pier, eighteen hundred or two thousand 
Foot long, with a Row of Ware-houses on the 
North side for the use of Merchants", running 
"so far into the Bay that Ships of the greatest 
Burthen may unlade without the help of Boats 
or Lighters." This description practically held 
good till after the Revolution and into the nine- 
teenth century. It was not till the eighteen 
fifties that the pier was largely widened and the 
range of heavy granite buildings below the Custom 
House, known as State Street Block, was erected 
in the place where ships formerly lay. At first 
called Boston Pier, its name in time became Long 
Wharf because it was "supposed to be the longest 
wharf on the continent." Through Province days 
it was the place of landing and official reception 
of all distinguished arrivals. The royal governors, 
from Shute to Gage, at their coming landed here 
and were formally received, and escorted by the 
local military companies up King Street to the 

[ 163 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

Town House. Here the main body of the troops 
embarked for the Bunker Hill Battle on Breed's 
Hill; and hence departed the army and the royal- 
ists at the Evacuation. The first house set up at 
the head of the pier was a tavern — the Crown 
Coffee House. Neighboring water resorts early 
followed, to become historic inns. There was 
first the Bunch of Grapes on the west corner of 
Kilby Street, begun before 1712; later, the British 
Coffee House, nearly opposite; and the Admiral 
Vernon, named in honor of Edward Vernon, the 
English admiral, on the lower corner of Mer- 
chants Row. The Bunch of Grapes was the tav- 
ern which the jovial young merchant of New 
York, Captain Francis Goelet, here in 1750, de- 
scribed in his journal recording his entertainment 
by the bucks of the town, as the "best punch 
house in Boston", which vinous sobriquet it 
retained through its long career. In pre-Revolu- 
tionary days it was the chosen resort of the 
patriot leaders, while the British Coffee House 
was the rendezvous of the British officers. Near 
the head of the pier were the warehouses of the 
Faneuils — Andrew, Peter, and Benjamin. When 
the Custom House was built, in 1 837-1 847 — the 

[ 164] 



The Water Front 

low, granite-pillared, Greek-like structure from 
whose modest dome springs the towering pyramid 
that now dominates the sky line — it stood at the 
head of the wharf with the bowsprits of vessels 
lying there stretching across the street almost 
touching its eastern part. It is an interesting tradi- 
tion, by the way, that on the site of the Custom 
House lived a cooper who turned out to have been 
a leader of the Fifth Monarchy Men. 

Central and India wharves, now piers of Maine 
and of New York steamboat lines, are among the 
oldest, as they are the finest, of the present 
wharves of this front. Central, with its range of 
more than fifty stores, dates from 1816; India, 
with a row of sixty odd, from 1806. Central 
Wharf was laid out originally over a part of the 
Barricado structure then still remaining. Near its 
head, on Custom House Street, the Old Custom 
House, predecessor of the present one, erected in 
1 8 10, yet stands, stripped, however, of the archi- 
tectural adornments of its facade, and of the 
spread eagle which once topped the pediment. 
The old building has a pleasant literary interest 
as the Custom House of George Bancroft and 
Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, — Bancroft as col- 

[ 165 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

lector, Hawthorne in the humbler post of weigher 
and ganger. Of the "Tea Party Wharf" or of its 
successor — Griffin's in the tea-ship's time, later 
Liverpool Wharf — no vestige remains, our guest 
was told. With curious interest he read the 
elaborate inscription reciting the story, beneath 
the model of a tea-ship, on the tablet attached 
to a building on the north corner of the avenue 
and Pearl Street. This tablet marks the wharf's 
site only in a general way. 

Rowe's Wharf, now a popular harbor steam- 
boats' pier, dates back to before 1764, and origi- 
nally was on the northerly side of Sconce, after- 
ward Belcher, Lane. Here we turn from the 
avenue, and entering Belcher Lane, finish our 
ramble in Fort Hill Square, the poplars of 
which we see at the end of the vista. As we 
loiter in this serene little park in the heart of a 
busy wholesale quarter, we note that it marks the 
lines of a plot on the summit of the hill that 
rose a hundred feet above, within which had stood 
the fort that gave the hill its name, and the 
larger fort that succeeded the first one, in which 
Andros found refuge in April, 1689, when the 
townspeople rose against and overthrew him. Till 

[ 166] 



The Water Front 

after the Revolution the summit was open ground, 
and in Province days a public mall. Here the 
anti-Stamp Act mob of 1765 had their bonfire 
of the wreckage of the Stamp office on Kilby 
Street, and of the fence of the stamp master's, 
Andrew Oliver, place on the hillside, in sight of 
his mansion. Here an ox was roasted for the 
people's feast at the celebration of the news of 
the French Revolution. The slopes of the hill 
became favorite dwelling places in early Colony 
days, and in Province days some fine seats occu- 
pied the hillside. In the latter eighteenth and the 
early nineteenth century the approach was marked 
by terraced gardens reaching to the hill top. In 
the eighteen thirties the plot on the summit was 
laid out as Washington Square, a circular green 
adorned with noble trees and surrounded by a 
street of genteel dwellings. In course of time its 
prosperity waned, and the genteel dwellings 
became squalid tenements. Then Fort Hill fell 
into ignoble decay. It remained, however, till 
the last of the eighteen sixties. Its leveling was 
begun in 1869, but the process was slow, and the 
ancient landmark did not wholly disappear till 
after the "Great Boston Fire" of 1872. 

[ 167] 



VII 

OLD SOUTH, KING'S CHAPEL, AND NEIGHBORHOOD 

ALTHOUGH both buildings are eighteenth- 
century structures, we presented the Old 
South Meeting-house and King's Chapel to our 
Englishman as monuments, respectively, of the 
Colony and of the Province. In this classification 
the Old South was assumed to stand for Puritan 
Boston, King's Chapel for the Boston of the 
regime of the royal governors. Architecturally, 
also, they might be taken as representing the two 
epochs. The Old South preserves the matured 
type of the Puritan meeting-house; the Chapel is 
of the old Church of England pattern, introduced 
with the establishment of the Province. The 
meeting-house, dating from 1729, is the second 
South Church (the meeting-house of the Third 
Church of Boston), the first having been erected 
in 1670; the chapel, dating from 1 749-1 754, is the 
successor of that first King's Chapel, erected in 
1688, for the site of which Andros assigned a 

[ 169] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

corner of the old First Burying-ground, when no 
Puritan landholder would agree to sell a lot for 
such a purpose. 

The Old South we were gratified to show off to 
our guest with the exterior fully restored to its 
original aspect, thus adding much to its pictur- 
esqueness as well as to its historical worth. Most 
satisfying was the restored Wren-like spire, which 
was quite likely modeled, though not directly 
copied, from the first one, of similar style, on 
Christ Church, erected some five years before, 
and which has been called more imposing than 
that. Indeed it has been pronounced by that 
master-critic, Richard Grant White, the finest of 
its kind, not only in this country but in the world, 
unequaled in grace and lightness by any spire of 
Sir Christopher's that he had seen. A peculiar 
interest attaches to it, as he says, because it is 
not an imitation of anything but is of home 
growth, the conception of a Yankee architect — 
the development of the steeple-belfry of the New 
England meeting-house. 

The historic structure permanently fixed, like 
the Old State House, and maintained solely as a 
memorial, is now, as we had remarked, counted one 

[ 170 ] 



Old South and King s Chapel 

of the valuable assets of the city by all classes of 
Bostonians. Yet its "saving", after its abandon- 
ment for church uses, was a task more difficult 
of accomplishment than that of rescuing the Old 
State House from the destroyer, when it was no 
longer useful: for in this case the property had 
to be purchased outright by citizens for reserva- 
tion, while in that, as we have seen, the city at 
first and finally the city in conjunction with the 
state assumed the financial burden. Though 
more arduous, however, it was as valiant a fight. 
And it was a more spectacular one, in that it was 
a woman's fight. It was carried through by a 
committee of twenty-five Boston matrons and 
maids under the direction of a small staff of com- 
petent men of affairs, in the centennial year of 
1876. The campaign was begun in earnest, after 
some preliminary skirmishing, when the building 
had been auctioned off as junk for thirteen hun- 
dred and fifty dollars and its demolition was im- 
minent; and it ended in victory with the contri- 
bution of one Boston woman, much the largest 
single subscription, completing the purchase fund 
at a critical moment when the option was about 
to expire. Before the restoration of the exterior 

[ 171 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

was undertaken, the interior was refashioned as 
far as possible to its appearance in the Revolu- 
tionary period, when it was the scene of those 
great, sometimes tumultuous, Town meetings, for 
the accommodation of which Faneuil Hall was 
too small, that "kindled the flame which fired 
the Revolution"; and that were of such fame in 
England as to inspire Burke, in imaging an un- 
usual tumult in Parliament, to the declaration 
that it was "as hot as Faneuil Hall or the Old 
South Church in Boston." Here we find a pop- 
ular museum of Revolutionary, Provincial, and 
Colonial relics, old furniture, and portraits of 
Boston worthies. The auditorium is now used 
for the institution known as the "Old South Lec- 
tures to Young People" founded by Mrs. Mary 
Hemenway, the matron who subscribed the 
largest amount to the preservation fund. 

The Old South has further interest, Antiquary 
recalled, as marking the site of the last dwelling- 
place of Governor Winthrop. It stands on what 
was the "Governor's Green", the Winthrop lot, 
so picturesquely called, extending along the "High 
Waye" between "Spring-gate" (Spring Lane) and 
Milk Street, upon which was placed the governor's 

[ 172 ] 



Old South and King s Chapel 

second mansion-house, the house of choice memo- 
ries from its association with Winthrop's closing 
years — the last five or six of his eventful life. 
The meeting-house occupies the garden end of 
the Green, while the mansion-house stood toward 
the north end facing the garden. The mansion 
had been erected in 1643, when Winthrop had 
disposed of his first one, that on our State Street, 
which he had occupied through the first twelve 
years of his Boston life. Winthrop died, after 
a month's slow illness developing from a hard 
Boston spring cold, on April 5 (March 26, 1648, 
O. S.), 1649, in his sixty-third year and the 
Town's nineteenth. As his peaceful end ap- 
proached, "the whole church fasted as well as 
prayed for him." The funeral solemnity was ap- 
pointed for a week and a day from his death, in 
order to give Governor John, Jr., of Connecticut, 
time for the then long journey from Hartford to 
Boston. Some years after the governor's death, 
the Green and the mansion came into the owner- 
ship of Parson John Norton of the First Church, 
one of the great ministers of his day, and of more 
liberal mind than some of his brethren; and upon 
his death the property passed to his widow. 

[ 173 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

The Third Church organized in 1669 was formed 
by seceders from the First Church, who split with 
that church chiefly on the burning issue of the 
baptismal, or "Half- Way", Covenant which they 
espoused, and Madam Norton, being one of the 
seceders, gave the garden plot In trust for the place 
of the new meeting-house. A few years later the 
remainder of the Green was conveyed to the new 
society; then the mansion-house became the par- 
sonage and so remained for almost a century. The 
mansion survived as an honored landmark through 
to the Revolution, when the British soldiery pulled 
it down for use as firewood during the winter of 
the Siege, along with a row of butternuts that 
shaded the venerable rooftree, while this present 
meeting-house was being utilized for the exercise 
of the cavalry horses. 

The first meeting-house, the erection of 1670, 
has been described as a little house of cedar, 
though "spacious and fair" to Puritan eyes, with 
a steeple, and porches on the front and two sides. 
In this meeting-house, on a July Sunday afternoon 
of 1677, occurred in sermon time that startling 
visitation of a Quakeress — Margaret Brewster 
— arrayed in the Biblical "sackcloth and ashes", 

[ 174 1 



Old South and King s Chapel 

her face blackened and her feet bare, — or as 
Sewall, the Boston Pepys, described: "covered 
with a Canvas Frock, having her hair dishevelled 
and Loose, and powdered with Ashes resembling 
a flaxen or white Periwigg, her face as black as 
Ink", — led by two other Quakers and followed 
by two more. After delivering to the amazed 
congregation a solemn warning of the coming of 
the black pox upon the Town in punishment for 
its persecution of the sect, she slipped out as 
quietly as she had entered. No wonder the per- 
formance occasioned, as Sewall records, "a great 
and very amazing Uproar." But the penalty 
was speedy, for the daring zealot was straight- 
way "whipt at the cart's tail up and down the 
Town with thirty lashes." This was the meeting- 
house, the orthodox doors of which Andros in 
1686 commanded opened a part of each Sunday 
to the pioneer Episcopal church that Randolph 
had set up in the Town House. It was here that 
the burial service over Lady Andros, the gov- 
ernor's American wife, who died less than three 
months after their coming to Boston, was given 
according to the Episcopal form, in the night 
time, when the sombre Puritan interior was weirdly 

[ 175] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

illuminated with candles and flaming torches, and 
torch bearers lighted the procession, with the 
"hearse drawn by six horses", to the tomb in 
the First Burying-ground. And this was the meet- 
ing-house in which on January 17 (sixth, O. S.), 
1706, Benjamin Franklin, born that same day, in 
a little house across the way on Milk Street 
(marked by the building Number 17) was bap- 
tized. This first South took on the name of Old 
South in 1 71 7, not because of its age, but to dis- 
tinguish it from the New South that year erected 
in Summer Street, where was Church Green. 
The first house was taken down to make way for 
this one, which occupies its exact site. The 
modern business block — the Old South Building 
• — towering around the meeting-house marks the 
remainder of the Governor's Green. 

Now we turned to neighboring landmarks. 
First we gave a passing glance to the little old 
building on the north corner of School Street 
nearly opposite the meeting-house. This is yet, 
it was remarked, a valued landmark, but a land- 
mark gone to seed. It dates from 171 2, and is 
supposed to have been the first of the brick 
houses erected in the rebuilding of a better Corn- 

[ 176 1 



Old South and King s Chapel 

hill (as this part of Washington Street, our guest 
was reminded, then was) after that "great fire" 
of 171 1, which swept through this quarter and 
destroyed the First Church meeting-house and 
the Town House. It is interesting as a type of 
the building of that day, battered though it is 
by time and repeated makings-over for business. 
In its mature years it was long cherished as the 
"Old Corner Bookstore", rich in memories of the 
golden age of Boston letters, but now, alas! 
sadly fallen to grosser trades. It marks, or nearly 
marks, the site of a house of larger historical im- 
port. This was the Hutchinson homestead, the 
dwelling of Mistress Ann Hutchinson, that supe- 
rior Boston matron "of a ready wit and bold 
spirit," about whom waged the fierce "Antino- 
mian Controversy" of 1637-1638, forerunner of 
the warfare against the Anabaptists and the 
Quakers, which nearly split the Colony. The out- 
come was Mistress Ann's conviction for "traducing 
the ministers and their ministry in the country" 
by advocating the doctrine of the "covenant 
of faith" as above that of the "covenant of 
works" which the ministers preached; her banish- 
ment together with high colonial leaders; and the 

[ 177 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

disfranchisement or disarming of nearly a hun- 
dred more of her adherents or sympathizers. She 
was the first introducer of the woman question 
in America, with the institution of meetings of 
Boston women to discuss the Sunday sermons 
after the manner of the men members of the 
Boston church. These meetings were held in 
the parlor of her house, and at first weekly. 
Soon they came twice a week and were attended 
by nearly a hundred of the principal women, 
numbers coming from the neighboring towns. 
One of the circle was the sweet-natured Mary 
Dyar, who was of the Quakers executed in Boston 
twenty years later. The discussions under the 
earnest and remarkably able leadership of Mis- 
tress Ann became so frank and so critical that 
the orthodox party was scandalized. And when 
her doctrine of the justification of faith without 
works had grown in popularity, or when all of 
the Boston church except five members proved 
to be sympathizers with her, their consternation 
was great. The story of the tragic end of Mis- 
tress Hutchinson - — killed with all her family ex- 
cept a daughter, in a general massacre of Dutch 
and English by the Indians in 1643, on Long 

[ 178] 



Old South and Kings Chapel 

Island, where she had finally established her home 
— is an often told tale. 

On the path back of the Governor's Green, 
which became Pudding Lane, dwelt another colo- 
nial matron who also came under the ban, but 
for a far different cause than Mistress Hutchinson, 
and who suffered tragically. She was Mrs. Ann 
Hibbins, gentlewoman, sister of Governor Bel- 
lingham and wife of William Hibbins, a merchant, 
and an important man in early Town and Colony 
affairs, sometime member of the Court of Assist- 
ants, later the Colony's agent to England. She 
was a widow when trouble came upon her. She 
had a clever but sharp tongue, and a high temper; 
and maybe she was a scold, for it is related that 
she was brought under church censure for quar- 
reling with her neighbors. At length she was 
accused of being a "witch." She was tried by a 
jury and condemned. The verdict, however, was 
set aside, and her case was taken to the General 
Court. Before that august body she defended 
herself ably. But the popular clamor was more 
than the court could withstand, and she was 
found guilty. John Endicott, then governor, pro- 
nounced the sentence of death upon her. So on a 

[ 179 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

day In June, in the year 1656, this spirited 
woman, "only for having more wit than her 
neighbors", as honest Parson Norton afterward 
said, was hanged on Boston Common, the second 
and last of the victims of the witchcraft delusion 
in Boston. We have the site of her home on 
Devonshire Street opposite the post-office, be- 
tween Milk Street and Spring Lane. 

Again on Washington Street, the site of the 
first tavern, Cole's "Ordinary", as the earlier 
inns were called, was identified. The ordinary 
opened its inviting door nearly opposite the head 
of Water Street. For a decade or so, Cole's was 
the only tavern in town; and its excellence was 
attested by young Lord Ley, the nineteen-year- 
old son of Marlborough, visiting Boston and his 
friend Harry Vane in the summer of 1637, when, 
declining Winthrop's invitation to become the 
guest of the governor's mansion, he declared that 
the tavern was "so well governed" that he could 
be as private there as elsewhere. Vane, during 
his brief reign as governor, utilized the inn for 
ofiicial entertainments. Some twenty years after 
the opening of Cole's, Robert Turner's "Blue 
Anchor", more famous in the Town's early his- 

[ 180] 



.T^sg-n:!. 
















In the old "Be II- in-Hand" Tavern 



Old South and King s Chapel 

tory, put out its hospitable sign on the opposite 
side of the way, about where now we see the 
Glohe newspaper office. A savory dish for which 
the Blue Anchor became renowned gave its first 
name of "Pudding" to the lane — Devonshire 
Street — upon which the tavern backed. During 
Landlord Turner's day, the Blue Anchor came to 
be the favorite place of lodging and refreshment 
with out-of-town members of the General Court, 
country clergy when summoned into synod, and 
juries. At a later day, under Landlord Monck, 
its entertainment was commended by traveled 
visitors as something quite after the solid old 
London sort. Dunton, the gossiping London 
bookseller, here in 1685, found "no house in all 
the Town more noted, or where a man might 
meet with better accommodations"; while the 
landlord was "a brisk and jolly" fellow whose 
** conversation was coveted by all his guests", 
animated as it was with a "certain vivacity and 
cheerfulness which cleared away all melancholy 
as the sun does clouds, so that it was almost im- 
possible not to be merry in his company." Verily 
a boniface of the good old London pattern, albeit 
a Puritan. 

[ 183 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

From Washington Street nearly opposite the 
Blue Anchor site, we plunged into the blind alley 
of Williams Court, one of the few surviving colo- 
nial passages, from a thoroughfare under an 
arched way through buildings making a short cut 
to a parallel street, and here came upon the rem- 
nant of a tavern set up a century after Land- 
lord Monck's day, in imitation of the English 
alehouse. This is the "Bell-in-Hand" of fragrant 
memory, dating back to 1795, and still sporting 
alluringly the original sign, a hand swinging a beH, 
though its career as an inn closed years ago, and 
it has been retained as what in England is classed 
as a pothouse solely by careful cultivation of the 
old London aspect. It was originally the estab- 
lishment of one Wilson, who had long occupied 
the useful office of town crier, and who cleverly 
chose for his tavern sign the symbol of his call- 
ing. 

At King's Chapel, particularly in the interior, 
our Englishman remarked a striking resemblance 
to old London churches. This was natural, for 
its architect frankly modeled it largely after the 
prevailing London type of his time. He was 
Peter Harrison, a London architect, who had 

[ 184] 



Old South and King s Chapel 

come over with Smibert and others in Dean 
Berkeley's train, and was estabHshed first with 
Berkeley at Newport, Rhode Island. He after- 
ward designed the Redwood Library, erected in 
1750, and other provincial buildings in Newport. 
His design for the Chapel included a spire above 
the tower, but this had to be cut out because of 
shortness of funds. The church was slowly built 
for the same reason. While the corner-stone was 
laid in August, 1749, as the legend above the 
portal states, the edifice was not completed and 
ready for regular services till August, 1754. It 
was built so as to inclose the old structure, and 
services were held in that one till the spring of 
1753, when it had fallen so out of repair that it 
had to be abandoned. The parishioners accepted 
temporarily the hospitality of Trinity, the newest 
of the three Episcopal churches in the Town at 
that time. 

The old structure was the Chapel of 1688, we 
explained, but doubled in size by an enlargement 
made in 1710, and, as pictured in one of the ear- 
liest views of Boston, with a tower, added at 
that time, surmounted by a tall staff topped with 
a gilt crown, symbolizing the Chapel's use as the 

[ 185] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

ofRcial church, and above this staff a weather- 
cock. With the enlargement of 1710, the interior 
was also embellished. There was the grand gov- 
ernor's pew raised on a dais above the others and 
approached by steps, hung with crimson curtains, 
and surmounted by the royal crown; while near 
by was another handsome pew reserved for the 
officers of the English army and navy. On the 
walls were displayed the escutcheons of the king 
and of the royal governor. The Chapel of 1688 
was a plain house of wood, and its cost was met 
from subscriptions by Andros and other crown 
officers, and by Church of England folk through- 
out the Colony. With Andros's overthrow in 
1689, it was temporarily closed, while Radcliffe, 
the rector, and the leading parishioners were 
clapped into jail — the old prison on Prison Lane 
— and retained there for nine months, when they 
were sent to England by royal command. The 
stone for the present Chapel came from the granite 
fields of Quincy, then Braintree, and was taken 
from the surface, there then being no quarries. 
The pillared portico was not completed till after 
the Revolution, in 1789. 

The last Loyalist service in the Chapel before 

[ 186] 




King^s Chapel 



Old South and King s Chapel 

the Evacuation was on the preceding Sunday. 
About a month later the Chapel was opened for 
a memorial service in honor of General Joseph 
Warren. Thereafter it remained closed for some 
two years. Then, by a curious fate, it was re- 
opened for use by the Old South congregation 
while their meeting-house was undergoing repair 
of the injuries it had received during the Siege; 
and they occupied it for nearly five years. In 
1782 the remnant of the Chapel's parishioners 
resumed regular services with the Reverend James 
Freeman as rector; and in 1787, under Mr. Free- 
man, this first Episcopal church in Massachusetts 
became the first Unitarian church in America. 



I 189] 



VIII 

PICTURESQUE SPOTS 

WE have thus far gone, Antiquary now re- 
marked, the rounds of what comprised the 
little, early Town of Boston. As we have found, 
it really does not extend from one extreme to the 
other more than a morning's walk, and few, very 
few, actual memorials are still to be seen. There 
yet remain picturesque spots here and there, 
which make it possible to recall some of the 
agreeable features of a somewhat later age. 

In byways off the thoroughfares through 
which we have just been passing are one or two 
of these spots that escape the officially guided 
tourist's eye. Such is the quaint iron gateway 
at the foot of the short court — Bosworth Street 
it is now — opening from Tremont Street oppo- 
site the old Granary Burying-ground. We find 
the court ending at a low stone barricade, with 
flights of heavy, rough, well-worn stone steps in 
the middle, leading down to the gateway; and 

[ 191 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

the gateway opening upon a narrow cross street 
of a single team's width, — Province Street of 
to-day, running between School and Bromiield 
streets, the Governor's Alley of Province days. 
For this, with Province Court opening from it 
eastward, was originally the avenue to the stables 
and rear grounds of the Province House. The 
gateway is not an ancient affair; It Is of early 
nineteenth-century date, set up, perhaps, when 
the court was opened, in the eighteen twenties, 
as Montgomery Place, a court of genteel dwellings. 
This court has an added Interest as the dwelling- 
place of Doctor Holmes for eighteen years, — from 
1 84 1, the year after his marriage, till his removal 
to Number 164 Charles Street, — where he wrote 
the Autocrat papers In large part, and those earlier 
poems which established him in the affections of 
Boston as its best beloved local bard; and where 
all his children were born. His was "that house 
at the left hand next the further corner" yet 
standing, which he describes In the Autocrat as the 
Professor's house. "When he entered that door, 
two shadows glided over the threshold; five lin- 
gered In the doorway when he passed through It 
for the last time, — and one of the shadows was 

[ 192 ] 



. Ik. 



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[11 Ir 

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Ps:^' 






J ' '♦I 



2^Ai? /ro« Gate between Province and Bosworth Streets 



Picturesque Spots 

claimed by its owner to be longer than his own." 
This lengthening shadow was that of "My Cap- 
tain" of the Civil War, and Mr. Justice Holmes 
of the United States Supreme Court to-day. 

A spot of earlier date and of different interest 
is found a little way up town, on Washington 
Street, opposite Boylston Street and near the cor- 
ner of Essex. If we look sharp, we shall see on a 
tablet affixed to the face of a building here a rude 
picture of a tree. This marks the site of the 
"Liberty Tree", a broad-spreading elm, beneath 
which was "Liberty Hall", the popular gathering 
place of the "Sons of Liberty" in the Revolution- 
ary days. Naturally, at the Siege the Bcitish 
soldiers chopped it down. 

Our final ramble is over the Old West End: 
the first West End, lying north and west of the 
slopes of Beacon Hill between the foot of Scollay 
Square at Sudbury Street and the River Charles. 
Originally its north bound was the North Cove, or 
Mill Pond, the water reaching Leverett Street at 
one point and cutting up toward the foot of Tem- 
ple Street at Cambridge Street, while high-water 
mark crossed Cambridge Street at its junction 
with Anderson Street coming down the hill. This 

[ 195 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

was the cove, we recalled, that the earth from the 
cutting of Beacon Hill top in 1811-1823 went to 
fill. It is an untidy quarter now, this Old West 
End, and in parts sordid. The pleasant old 
streets, and Bowdoin Square, its once fair central 
feature, with their refined homes of respectability 
and imposing mansion-houses set in fine gardens, 
are now sadly blemished with ill-favored struc- 
tures replacing the handsome dwellings, while 
pretty much all of the quarter is deplorably 
shabby. Yet here and there we come upon pic- 
turesque spots and a landmark or two of value. 

Most refreshing was the sight of the old West 
Meeting-house setting back from and above Cam- 
bridge Street, now preserved and protected by its 
use as the West End Branch of the Boston Public 
Library. In this we have an admirable example 
of a favored type of brick meeting-house at the 
opening of the nineteenth century. It dates from 
1806, as one of the tablets on its face records, 
and replaces the first West Church, a house of 
wood, erected in 1737. The first West Church 
was the meeting-house which was used as a bar- 
rack during the Siege, and the steeple of which 
was taken down because it had been used by the 

[ 196] 



xin 













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S^~-. i"^-\ 









.:":;i'-">:.%>«>N ^ 



J Bit of old Lever ett Street 



Picturesque Spots 

"rebels" for signaling the American Camp at 
Cambridge, just before the Siege. It was demol- 
ished to make way for the present structure which 
occupies its site. In its history of nearly one 
hundred and seventy years as a place of worship, 
the West Church was the pulpit of but five pas- 
tors in succession; and the services of two of the 
five covered the whole period of the present meet- 
ing-house. These were Charles Lowell, father of 
James Russell Lowell, who served from 1806 till 
his death In 1861, fifty-five years, and Cyrus A. 
Bartol, first from 1837 to 1 861 as Doctor Lowell's 
colleague, and afterward as sole pastor till his 
death in 1901, a service in all of sixty-five years. 
The second of the five, the Reverend Jonathan 
Mayhew, 1 747-1 766, has been claimed not only 
as a fearless early Revolutionary patriot, but also 
as the first preacher of Unltarianism In Boston 
pulpits, and, too, by the Unlversallsts as the first 
Boston preacher of their faith. It was gratifying 
to find the old entrance square, or park, well 
cared for; and the oaks that Doctor Lowell had 
transplanted here from the grounds of his Cam- 
bridge "Elmwood" where they had been raised 
from acorns, our guest was told. And the colonial 

[ 199 ] 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

brick and Iron fence enclosing the square, with 
the handsome gate and the old-fashioned swinging 
sign above it, added the pleasing finishing touches 
to this attractive spot in a depressingly unattract- 
ive neighborhood. 

Lynde Street, at the side of the church and 
running over a knoll to Green Street, is one of the 
older streets of the quarter and was new and of 
the highest respectability when the first West 
Church was built, which faced it. The street was 
cut through "Lynde's Pasture" and was named 
for the Lynde family, which, beginning with Simon 
Lynde, a colonial Boston merchant and large 
owner of Boston realty, rose to larger distinction 
through Simon's son and grandson, Benjamin and 
Benjamin, 2d, both of whom became chief justices 
of the Province. The latter presided at the trial 
of Captain Preston, after the " Boston Massacre " 
of 1770, when Preston was defended by the patriot 
leaders, John Adams and Josiah Quincy. Lever- 
ett Street, practically a continuation of Lynde 
Street across Green Street, is of about the same 
age and was of similar high character in its prime, 
albeit after the opening of eighteen hundred the 
almshouse and the jail were established here. It 

[ 200 1 



«l m 










,1 ■•- ^|1S; 










if^r 




The ^aint Corner where Poplar and Chambers Streets meet 



Picturesque Spots 

was named for Governor Leverett, who was a 
large landowner In these parts. To-day we find 
it eminently a foreign quarter, with Russian Jews 
largely herded here, the cheerful old houses trans- 
formed into or supplanted by dismal tenements 
and bedaubed shops. Yet in this unkempt thor- 
oughfare the Artist pointed out more than one 
picturesque spot and made a sketch of a bit of 
the street. Once there were quiet little residen- 
tial courts off the street, and there yet remain a 
foot passage or two between thoroughfares. 

Through one of these — Hammond Avenue it Is 
now loftily designated, though not wide enough for 
three to walk abreast — we press to the thorough- 
fare of Chambers Street, parallel with Leverett. 
Here again we are In a once choice neighborhood 
fallen upon sorry days, yet retaining plctur- 
esqueness In parts, and remnants of past glory. 
These remnants are mostly to be seen In the old 
streets running southward from Chambers, — 
Poplar, Allen, McLean. Of one quaint corner, 
where Chambers and Poplar streets meet, the 
Artist makes a sketch for us. Another picturesque 
corner we note is where Chambers and McLean 
meet, opposite the church — an old-time Unitarian 

[ 203 1 



Rambles Around Old Boston 

meeting-house turned Roman Catholic. Taking 
McLean Street, we have a pleasing approach to 
the great domain of the old Massachusetts Gen- 
eral Hospital with a part of the main building of 
Bulfinch's design appearing before us at the end of 
the vista. This hospital, the Englishman was 
aware, is especially distinguished as the institu- 
tion in which the first extensive surgical operation 
on a patient under the influence of ether was suc- 
cessfully performed. That was in October, 1856, 
and our guest might see hanging in the main 
building a picture commemorating the event, with 
portraits of the surgeons and physicians present 
on the great occasion; while in the Public Garden 
is J. Q. A. Ward's commemorative monument. 
Founded in 1799, incorporated in 181 1, and opened 
to patients in 1821, we remarked that this hos- 
pital was the second to be established in the coun- 
try, the Pennsylvania Hospital having been the 
first. While numerous other great modern hospi- 
tals, some more splendidly endowed, have since 
been erected In Boston, we were confident that we 
were but echoing the best opinion when we as- 
sured our guest that it continues one of the most 
complete and perfectly organized institutions of its 

[ 204 ] 



Picturesque Spots 

class. It is a little city, now, of fine buildings 
finely equipped, yet the Bulfinch granite structure, 
the central part of the first main building, re- 
mains the most picturesque. 

At this spot, dedicated to the alleviation of hu- 
man suffering, the Artist and Antiquary found a 
suitable occas,ion for telling their intelligent guest, 
the Englishman, that the complete separation be- 
tween the Past and Present was well expressed 
in the surrounding neighborhood. Where once 
stood the comfortable houses of prosperous Bos- 
ton, now on every hand are the homes, humble 
Indeed but still homes, of many races, secure 
In the liberties that his kin beyond the seas had 
nobly won. 

As we parted, the Englishman, not without 
emotion, admitted that he had seen and heard 
many things to confirm a belief with which he 
had begun our little tours, that the greatness 
of his race was still as well carried forward in 
this early home of sedition and rebellion as in 
the Mother Isle Itself. 



[ 205 ] 



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